A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

(A/N: Freddie spends a good portion of this chapter talking quite frankly about sex. He doesn't get graphic, nor are there any graphic descriptions of sex but he does talk about it quite a bit. The bit that is riskiest (in my opinion) is marked out with (**) before and after that section. This particular section is not central to the plot and can be skipped if you don't want to peak further into his head.

This is another one of those cases where a long planned chapter happens to be being written during a time where the correct and incorrect way of treating women is being discussed internationally. However I would say that that is not what I am trying to do here. Here I just want to tell a story. Although I will admit that no-one is an island, this chapter is not intended as a comment on current gender politics and the fact that it is being written during a time where such subjects are being discussed in the news is purely coincidental.)

Kerrass has this game he likes to play.

It is not a good game. He mostly does it because it satisfies three of his basic needs. The first need is because it entertains him. The second need is because it gets him free things. The last need is because it annoys me.

Despite what he might say, Kerrass bears many similarities to the animal with which he shares the name of his school. He is a hunter and spends weeks living in relative squalor, camping by the side of the road or sleeping in barns, stables and lofts. He eats whatever people can afford to feed him and often finds that he gets short changed and over charged by the very people that he risks his life in an effort to save. He does all of these things happily and without complaint.

But sometimes he decides that enough is enough and he wants some proper pampering.

So what he does is to head off to the nearest city of note. That being described as a place that has several taverns and several different places of entertainment. This means that there is more than one Brothel, card playing house and similar such entertainments are a lot easier to find. We march through the gates with enough of a bribe to make sure that we're not going to get into any trouble, leave the horses with a reputable livery stable so that they can get well looked after themselves, then he marches to the most expensive restaurant that there is where he eats so much that he can barely contain it, he does this while ordering the best wine available of which he insists that we drink at least a bottle each. Then he insists that we go to the best brothel/whorehouse/bordello in the city where we spend the night, making best use of the ladies available.

The game starts when we get to the whorehouse and it will take a moment or two to set the scene as it is a little bit embarrassing to me personally.

So picture the scene. We walk through the door. The decent places have somewhere to put our cloaks, weapons and boots so that we don't trail mud and violence everywhere before we go into the entrance area. As we walk in, we are spotted quickly. Possibly as a result of a signal from the person taking the weapons off us, that a Witcher has just walked in. It's not that brothels refuse the patronage of Witchers you understand but they generally prefer to get them out of the way and into a more private area to avoid any of the potential unpleasantness that can sometimes come as the result of Kerrass' presence.

The Brothel Madame, or senior courtesan approaches us and looks us up and down.

Having spent a bit more time in this kind of establishment since my travels with Kerrass started I am now, much more aware of what's actually going on here. The Madame is “cold reading” her clients. What she's looking for varies but in short, the kind of thing she's looking for are:

Apparent wealth as this is often a signifier of how much money the client can spend.

Taste. How gaudy is the clients clothing and jewellery. The gaudier the dress means that the client is more likely to be a one timer. They have got rich suddenly and are blowing it all on one grand night.

General drunkenness. As exhibited by how bloodshot the eyes are and whether or not the client is swaying or not.

Temperament, how are the eyes moving, do their fists clench involuntarily, do they have scars on their knuckles and other such signs.

Mood, because a good Madame, especially of the kind that Kerrass likes to frequent when he's in this kind of mood, tailors the clients experience to suit them.

Cleanliness, for reasons that I'm not going to go into here.

Some people are thrown out on the basis of whatever a madame might see at this point. The really good brothels have bouncers on the door so any of the particularly unpleasant punters have already been filtered out by the time that you get to the stage of meeting the madame in question.

So after the Madame has had a chance to look you up and down, the next thing that happens is that there is a greeting. If you think that you've already moved past the “appraisal stage” then you would be mistaken. Do NOT try to impress the madame as believe me, she has seen everything.

At this stage, I had actually stopped being surprised at the number of times that Kerrass has walked through the door to be greeted by name by the madame in question. As, again like the cat that he takes the name of his school from, he is a creature of habit.

So we walk in, Kerrass greets the lady in question,

Yes the madame is a lady. I've known more courtesy and good manners in many of the brothels that Kerrass has taken me to over the last year and a half than in some Noble's castles.

Kerrass and the lady exchange a few pleasant greetings before they turn to me.

“Who's this you've brought me?” says the madame, or words to that effect.

Here begins the game.

Another truth is that regardless of whether you call these women whores, courtesans, companions or prostitutes, your visit is not special to them. No matter how much they might claim that it is. This is their job. How many of you reading this, actually enjoy your job? You might be good at it. You might take satisfaction from that skill and doing a good job right. I've even met some prostitutes that enjoy the act that their job entails. But it's still their job and you should not pretend otherwise to yourself.

What this means is that they are absolute suckers for some free entertainment.

“This,” Kerrass says, changing his manner from being quiet and charmingly conservative so as not to frighten the madame to a manner more befitting a carnival performer. “This is the noble Frederick von Coulthard. Noble, scholar and gentleman.”

At this point in the proceedings I generally sigh as though I wish that the ground is settling over my shoulders. It's never nice being the subject of so much appraising attention. Especially when that appraising is being done by beautiful women.

“He doesn't look like very much,” is the most common comment that I get as a result of this exhibition.

“Even so.” Kerrass carries on, by now gathering something of an audience. “His rather plain features, lack of general musculature and posture that wouldn't be unsuitable to the local freak show, hide a most noble character. This man is fearless. Fearless I say.”

By now a couple of people are beginning to cotton on to the show and are cheering Kerrass on whilst openly mocking me.

“This brave man,” Kerrass carries on, “leapt into a den of monsters to save a young girls stuffed toy.”

“Oooh,” go the crowd. .

“This man gave away his last piece of bread to feed starving children,”

Another groan comes from the crowd. By now I'm generally doing my best to snag a drink of some kind.

“But most importantly of all,” Kerrass is now building up to the punchline and the climax of his little show. “Beneath the proud and troubled brow of this most noble of an individual is housed the most perfect lover that any lady in this house has ever known.”

To which every woman there. Every woman there lets out a chorus of protests.

“No no it's true,” protests Kerrass. “No woman has ever, has ever gone a full night with this man here without being utterly and completely satisfied... Lo they tell tales of this man's prowess in Temeria. He walked, alone, into the whorehouses of Vizima and proceeded to pleasure all of the whores of that famed institution “The house of the Queen of the night,” over the course of a week.

“Why a week I hear you ask?”

I swear I'm not making this up. I've heard this speech given on multiple occasions now.

“Because as any true lover knows.” Kerrass turns to me and raises his eyebrows.

Generally at this point I sigh theatrically, knowing the part I'm expected to play and trot out the line “It takes time to do it right,”

“You tell us all these things Kerrass but I'm not sure that I believe it,” the Madame generally opines. “He's scrawny, stoop shouldered and doesn't look as though he would know what to do with a woman if we all threw ourselves at him.”

“Not only would he know what to do, but he is willing to prove it as well.”

“Oh yes?”

As I say, Prostitutes lives are either boring or incredibly terrifying in which case they need to find themselves a better place to work but that's a discussion for another time. In these kinds of places. In the upmarket expensive places that Kerrass chooses when he's in one of these moods. The women are generally bored to tears.

“Yes,” Kerrass says with a sly smile. “I propose a wager.”

Sometimes a chant breaks out at this point along the lines of “Wager, Wager, Wager,” or similar. I'm now glaring at Kerrass who returns my gaze, radiating innocence.

“I propose.” Kerrass shouts the words until he gets silence. “I propose that the lady of Madame's choice, takes my companion off to the room of her choice for the night. The lady of choice can be as jaded or as virginal as the madame pleases. All that I ask is that she be honest of character,”

This condition often gets people jeering,

“In the meantime, I will avail myself of the pleasures of this delightful establishment. Then, in the morning. The Madame can ask the lady if she is completely satisfied.”

More jeering and cheering.

“If the lady says yes. Then the price of our evenings entertainment is cut in half. If not... then we pay in full. As well as say, a drink for everyone currently guesting in this fine establishment. On the house if we win. Paid for by us if we lose.”

“If he fails you mean.”

“As you say.” Kerrass generally bows again at this point.

Normally the madame comes over and makes a show of looking me up and down. The amount of money being wagered here is not small but she knows that she needs to make just as much of a play of it as we did.

“What do you think ladies?” The madame will turn to the girls.

What happens here is varied. There is often a chorus of disbelieving giggles and whispered conversation. I don't blame them. It bears reminding the reader of what I actually look like.

I'm not handsome. I'm not well muscled in any way. I've put on weight in certain areas but there's relatively little muscle definition that you would see in someone like Kerrass or any of the strong men that you might see by the side of the road and in carnivals. I'm gangly and although people have, very kindly, commented that I've grown in confidence, poise and grace over the months that I've spent on the road with Kerrass, I have no illusions.

I don't look like much is what I'm trying to say.

I'm not ugly. I no longer have the squint or the stoop that I used to have but nor am I going to turn many heads at court when I go down there in a couple of days time.

So I can generally forgive the ladies of these establishment for their assessment. If I haven't done so previously, I normally take this opportunity to snag a drink from a passing tray.

Then comes the sacrificial lamb.

It's not unknown for the madame herself to take up Kerrass' challenge but regardless, a woman steps forward. This has happened often enough that I can normally spot which lady it is that will take me up on Kerrass' offer.

She's generally an older lady from the pack. I try never to guess a woman's age but she's definitely a bit more jaded, a bit more experienced than the other giggling girls. She's also, generally, a little more aggressive with her sexuality without any kind of hint of shyness. I won't lie that I sometimes find such women frightening which possibly says something about me.

I'm not sure what but it does say something.

She steps forward. Looks me up and down and says something like.

“I will take him,”

At which point the game is on. Kerrass and the madame shake hands in the manner of two professionals coming to a formal agreement. I set my drink aside and bow formally over the ladies hand which I gently brush my lips against.

“Your servant milady.” I say.

Never let it be said that I don't enjoy rising to the challenge.

I hadn't meant to write a pun there but now that I've written it, I'm going to leave it.

I don't know why Kerrass finds this so amusing. Although he may say that one of those reasons is that I have yet to disappoint him.

I remember when it started too. The first time he took me into town it was maybe a week after the incident with Sir William the Ram and old Annie the troll. We went into town and I was mortified and embarrassed as I realised that he was leading me towards a brothel. I stammered something about finding an inn or something to spend the night and that I'd meet him in the morning.

Kerrass was having none of it though and took me firmly by the arm and escorted me into the building. At the time I remember that the jests he made at my expense were a lot sharper in their tone. He played the part of a man of the world who had taken a young and foolish boy under his wing for which I should be suitably grateful. I was given a girl and told to go off and enjoy myself.

So I did.

The girl that had been selected for me was one of the more experienced ladies of that particular house. I'll never forget her as she was very kind to me as I was still a little wide-eyed and very wet behind the ears. I was still having my day to day prejudices and opinions about the world shaken on a daily basis and I was rather taken aback by the overt sexuality on display as well as the... well the wanton decadence that that particular house was known for. Her name was Rose. I doubt that this was her real name as some of the other names that I heard that night were Daffodil, Daisy, Tulip and Hyacinth.

As I say she was very kind to me. She asked if I was a virgin, which I wasn't, before enquiring about why I was so uncomfortable.

Yes, I had visited a brothel in Oxenfurt a couple of times with friends. It's a discreet kind of place that caters to.... well I suppose that it caters to people like me. It's a place that you can go, have a drink with a beautiful woman and then, if she agrees which is an important part of any arrangement that I might enter into with a woman, we go to her room and...well...

I'm sure you get the idea.

But I remember that first night with Rose. She was doing her best to get something going but then something in me snapped and I took control of the situation.

The following morning an astonished Kerrass greeted me as Rose came out to wave me off with a kiss on my cheek and a dreamy smile.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded as we rode away.

“What the hell was what?” I wondered.

“That was Rose,” he said. “She gets given all the inexperienced men but I heard her when I was walking past your room last night on my way to get more wine. She, NEVER does that. She came to see you off. She never does that either.”

“Really?” I shrugged, trying and failing to play it cool but deep down I was being ridiculously and childishly pleased with myself.

The next time we visited a brothel he was morbidly fascinated. In that place we were guided to a private area where we were served wine. I saw Kerrass speak to the woman in charge and he watched with mounting horror as I made my courtesies to the selected woman. Again, the following morning I saw him talk to the madame and him staring at me with wide eyes. His opinion in me rose sharply after that.

(**)

The truth is that I've never found it that difficult to please women in the bed chamber. Those same prostitutes have admitted that I am far from massively endowed, the most I have been given was that I was “pleasingly average”. But as I say, I've never found it difficult to please a woman.

Getting a woman into the bed chamber? That is something I find much more difficult. Hugely more difficult. So much so that I have sometimes wondered if I might be deficient in some way.

Once they're there though?

Nothing to it.

I've sat having excruciatingly funny/embarrassing conversations with some of my female friends as they have described their own sexual escapades and I've been left honestly astonished as to how my gender can honestly be so utterly useless at giving pleasure to women.

It's not even that difficult.

You wanna know the secrets?

Read a book.

Specifically, read a book on female anatomy. Pay close attention to those areas that will be clearly marked as being sensitive to the touch on a woman's body.

Once you have learned which areas are which, see how your chosen partner reacts to having those areas touched.

Be gentle at first as the scale of sensitivity runs from ticklish, through pleasure to pain and that scale shifts according to the ladies mood.

Always check for consent. I cannot stress this enough. It might shock you to learn this but people talk and you will be surprised how quickly reputations can be made or torn down.

But above all, there are two tricks....

I never thought I'd be writing these things down.

The first trick is this... Be patient. Take your time. It can sometimes take a long time for a lady to get.... worked up and different women react differently. So be prepared to put the work in

The second thing is this..... Learn how to give really good head.

Trust me.

If women are reading this then first of all....

You're welcome.

Secondly....

Tell your partner what you like. If they are not willing to do that then you might want to consider why. You might even surprise each other.

But enough of that.

I won't lie though. Part of why I'm telling you all this is so that I can see my sister's face when she reads it.

Either sister for that matter.

Or brother.

I don't need to worry about Ariadne. I already know that she will read the above with interest and curiosity.

Why do men normally not bother with this kind of thing?

Wiser people than me have been asking that question for centuries and I'm not going to bother get into it

here.

Why do I do it?

Because it's fun.

Enough of this kind of talk.

(**)

So why am I telling you about this game of Kerrass'?

Because a month or so after we had left Kaer Morhen, Kerrass took me to a brothel. We had come down from some of the wilder and rockier countryside that marks the northern borders of Redania after a couple of hunts. We were grimy, tired and we wanted some civilisation. Kerrass had been working hard for the last couple of weeks and we had plenty of money and an urge to spend it. We rode into a town and went straight to the bathhouse where we spent a long time soaking our cares away before eating a huge meal and then we went to the local brothel.

It looked like a nice enough place. Music was playing, the sun was out and there were flowers everywhere. The place was also expensive and powerful enough that they didn't have to send their women out into the streets to try and draw in the punters. Instead there were well dressed men who invited you in.

We thanked the footmen at the entrance who took our gear. The party seemed to be going full swing. A younger girl, clearly an apprentice of some kind, brought us some wine and we sipped for a while before a well to do woman of middle years, (remember I never guess a lady's age,) came forward and asked us how she could serve us.

I couldn't tell if she knew Kerrass or not but I did notice that she didn't flinch away from his gaze which is much more than some people manage.

Kerrass opened his mouth to begin his speech and I was steeling myself for the coming show.

But then Kerrass stopped, mouth open and he turned to me, he closed his mouth and I saw a strange thought cross his face.

“No, you know what?” he said quietly. “My friend here gets the best that you have. Whatever he wants for the night. On me. All of it. I wouldn't mind some time with Alanis if she's available but otherwise. Treat my friend here like a King.”

The woman's eyes widened in surprise. A surprise that must have been mirrored in my own face.

“Is it your friends birthday?”

“Mm?” Kerrass turned back to her as if he hadn't heard. “No, no it's not his birthday. He saved my life recently.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Enjoy yourself Freddie. Marilyn here will look after you.” He turned back to the party and was downing his drink.

Marilyn looked at me.

“You saved his life?”

I shook my head. Not in a negative but more in surprise. “It's not been a great month. You know Kerrass?”

She showed me through to another room where there was a large bath and a massage table. She gestured for me to strip and started bundling up my clothes that I assumed would be taken off for cleaning. She gestured to a series of cubby holes where I found folded robes and some warm and soft slippers.

“Does anyone really know a man like that,” she said as I dis-robed. “Better than some but worse than others. I first met him ten years ago when I still worked as one of the girls. I was going to take over the running of the place and was learning how to do it from my predecessor. We were the first place in this part of the world that dared,” she said that with a smile and a wink, “to take a man to the watch for beating on his girl. The locals didn't like that and they chose to make their displeasure known by beating up whores all over the city. As a result, all of our girls made it known that girls could work here free of that kind of fear. We were packed to the rafters with girls in a couple of days and soon we were the only open brothel in the town. Men started to queue up to get in. Master Kerrass was here one night having paid a good amount for some time with a girl when someone decided to “test our mettle”,”

She smiled at the memory.

“Kerrass pulled him off the girl, wrestled him to the ground and knocked him out. Then he offered to allow the girl to kick him a few times before Kerrass threw him out. He was dead drunk and swaying as he did so but it struck all of us at the time that he was being surprisingly courteous to whores.”

She put my clothes in a bag.

“We like Kerrass here milord you can rest assured about that.”

I nodded. It sounded like Kerrass.

But as I say, it hadn't been a good month.

Not since we had left Kaer Morhen anyway.

-

In the end, I decided not to drink from the small bottle that Letho gave me the afternoon after I had woken up from Letho's approximation of the Witcher trials as I found that I didn't really want to sleep.

Letho had wandered off somewhere and I spent a long time looking at the ceiling. I felt... oddly calm. I realise that I should have been angry. I should have been absolutely furious at the fact that I had been drugged, hypnotised, beaten up and abused but somehow I found that I wasn't. Instead I needed to pee rather desperately.

My saddlebags had been returned along with the rest of my belongings so I got dressed and went outside to piss off the walls of the fortress and down to the valley below. The sun was setting and I saw something that objectively I had already known. Kaer Morhen valley was a beautiful place. I couldn't bring myself to believe that a person would come here to retire or just spend the time looking out over that valley, but I could understand old Witchers coming here to retire, to watch their remaining years stretch out in front of them in an endless stream of training new students.

Not that they ever did. Kerrass had told me time after time that Witcher's don't retire. They might take some time off the path to train or find themselves something else to do like run a tavern or become a killer for here, but sooner or later, the path calls them back until they are there in the darkness, a flash of silver, a roar of a beast and then....

An unmarked grave at best or, at worst, an unmarked pile of monster droppings.

I felt my thoughts turn towards the maudlin and went back inside to fetch a bottle of spirits that I had seen on the shelf of the Witcher's pantry. While I had been outside I had heard the sound of metal being worked. A hammer on an anvil and went off to investigate where I found Letho working at the forge.

I found a box to perch on and watched him work.

“Not tired Scribbler?” He asked after a while.

“It's not that,” I said taking a long drink from the bottle. I strongly suspect that on any other day, the contents of that bottle would have scoured the insides of my throat clean. “It's just,” I felt a smile start to grow on my face. “You'll forgive me if I don't really fancy taking any more of your potions just yet.”

I swear, I swear that I saw a flicker of a smile across Letho's face at that point before he turned away and plunged the metal that he was hammering into one of the barrels for quenching.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Practising mostly.” He grunted. “Alchemy and forging is like any kind of craft, skill or art. If you don't practice it you're never going to get good at it and if you're good at it you need to keep practising to stay good at it.”

“True words.” I said as I watched. I found that I liked it out there. It was cold despite the time of year. We were still high up and the sky was clear and getting darker. The wind was beginning to come off the mountain peaks and I was beginning to get cold. But I found that I relished that cold and enjoyed the shivers.

“I do have one question though,” I said as I took another swig from the bottle.

“Only one?” Letho rumbled holding his hand out for the bottled while he pumped the bellows that worked the forge.

“For now.” I tried for a smile. I knew that my eyes hadn't changed shape but I wondered if any of Letho's other concoctions would have a lasting effect on me. “I've read everything that has been written on the subject of Witchers.”

“Including the lies?” Letho handed the bottle back.

“Especially the lies. My tutor once told me that you can learn a lot that is true from blatant falsehood.”

“Heh,” Letho wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It seemed to be some kind of habit. A nervous gesture or...something.

“But I've read everything that I can find and although I've heard of the trial of Grasses many times, the choice occasionally and the Trial of Dreams rarely....”

“Sometimes they get called different things. I know that the Manticore used to mix the trial of Dreams and the Trial of Grasses together as they believed that that might mitigate some of the problems.”

“Interesting.... But that's not my question. My question is this. What's the trial of the mountain? I've never heard of it before. I stress that I'm not going to drink anything else that you give me voluntarily.”

Letho grinned.

“It's not that exciting to be honest. You won't have heard of the Trial of the Mountain because it was actually a lot rarer than the rest.”

“Why? What did it do?”

“I thought you said that you only had one question Scribbler?”

“I'm a scholar. It's part of the job. In the same way that being a dick head is part of yours.”

Letho looked at me for a long time.

“I like you Scribbler.”

The way he said it made it seem like high praise. Which I suppose it was.

“The trial of the Mountain was for the failures.”

“You make it sound so warm and fuzzy.”

Letho said something obscene.

“What it was was this. On those batches of students, when the mages and the Witcher elders could afford to be...benevolent...heh... when there was one student or a couple of students that had taken some or most of the mutations but not quite all of them stuck. You know, maybe they had a non-fatal allergic reaction to one of the more important ingredients of the Witcher potions so he could never use.... I don't know, he could use the potion that we called “Swallow,” but couldn't use “White Rafferd's decoction,” or something similar. Maybe his Iris control was still a little bit too involuntary for the comfort of the elder Witchers or he had a childhood injury or illness which meant that some bits of him never worked properly. In short, someone would come out of the trials and they weren't quite up to where they wanted him to be.”

“Failures,”

“We never called them that. They were still Witchers but... Another example would be, maybe they had an attitude problem. Maybe they had passed the trial of choice but then would run away from the keep and had to be pulled back every single time. Maybe they had a habit of not paying attention in the class to do with Necrophages. The trial of the Mountain was then administered.”

Letho spent some time working the bellows before taking the metal out and hammering at it again.

“The trial of the mountain varied but it was, in short, a test. Sometimes the student would go out with a more experienced Witcher, or they would spend time with an elder. They would be sent off to hunt a troll or something to see if they could live up to the requirements of the rest of the school.”

“Sounds brutal.”

“Have you not figure this out yet Scribbler? Witcher schools are fine places to be if you're a guest, or if you have passed your trials and you wear your medallion proudly. But for the students?”

He took a cloth and wiped some of the soot from the forge off his head.

“You're a religious man Scribbler.”

“I am.”

“What's your idea of hell?”

“I don't know. I don't really think about it. The world is supposed to end in cold and ice so I always thought about hell as being like endless snow and ice.”

Letho grunted.

“My idea of hell is having to go back to Witcher school. That I have to go through more mutations and more tests.” He took the piece of metal that he had been working on, poured an oil on it and started working it against a grinding wheel.

“I wake up some nights Scribbler, and if any other Witcher claims that they don't then they're either lying to you, or they're a cat Witcher who's already gone mad. I wake up nights and I can hear the scream in the back of my throat. I dreamt that I was back there in Viper keep, in the cages that they used to suspend above the forges so that we could breathe in the fumes and the mutagens. That was their method of helping us get used to it. They wanted us to breathe it in. I wake up and just for a moment I think that I'm about to be put back in the cages.”

He shook his head.

“Go back inside Scribbler. It's going to get cold. I understand you're leaving tomorrow so if you're going to read any of the books then you need to do it now before the Kitten comes to take you away.”

I did as I was told.

Roughly two hours later Letho came back into the keep dragging a huge sack behind him. It turned out that he had been slow roasting a mountain goat in an earthen ware oven that he had built in a pit out the back of Kaer Morhen. He'd done it in a mix of herbs and spices and it was so mouth wateringly tender that it seemed to melt in my mouth as I ate it. Along with some more of his fresh bread, root vegetables from his vegetable patch and some fruit to finish up. My mood was even more improved when it was obvious that we would be taking some of the left over meat with us when we departed in the morning.

We spent the evening playing cards. Letho's mood had shifted and much to my astonishment I found that he was also the possessor of a fine, bone dry wit. He told me the story about how he and Kerrass had met in a tavern in Vizima where a case of mistaken identity had meant that each of them had been hired to kill a monster that had turned out to be the other Witcher. One tavern brawl later and the two of them had become friendly enough that they both blamed the other for the initial misunderstanding.

I traded him that story for some other stories about Kerrass that I had come across as well as the story about how I had met Ariadne which caused Letho much amusement.

But the trials of the day began to tell and eventually I slumped into sleep. As I drifted off to my chemically enhanced slumber, my last sight was of Letho working the piece of metal that he had been forging earlier in the day.

I woke up the following day after a surprisingly blissful nights sleep to the sight of Kerrass and Letho catching up over a breakfast made up of last night's leftover goat, bread and a spirit so strong that I was surprised that the two men were getting into it so early in the day. They greeted me as I sat down and Letho pushed over a breakfast far larger than I would normally have in the morning before Kerrass started making noises that it was time to go.

It wasn't hard to figure out that they were having a bit of fun at my expense so I thought it was my duty to ignore the bastards.

Even so, Kerrass had packed our provisions and my belongings so that no sooner had I finished my breakfast than it was time to leave. I saw the two Witchers embrace fiercely before parting with the kind of bruising hug that people give each other when they're trying to make the other person seem weak.

Letho came to me next and took a dagger off his belt and handed it over. Not one of the crossed ones but it had been jammed in his belt next to them.

“There you go Scribbler.”

“Is this the one that you were working on last night.”

Letho shrugged.

“Take care of it. It's not a proper fang but it'll do the job.”

I looked down at the tall, bald brute of a man from the back of my horse as I tucked the dagger into my belt.

“Take care of yourself Letho,”

“You too Scribbler.”

He turned and walked back into the keep without another word.

I watched carefully as we rode out of the castle and back onto the road but Kerrass didn't look back. I kept my thoughts to myself after that.

But it wasn't that easy. Kerrass spent the next little while.... I don't quite know how to describe what happened then. I suppose it could be argued that what happened was that he spent the next little while losing himself.

I didn't notice what was happening until the process had already begun. At first I just explained his silence away as the fact that he might have nothing to say. I had enough experience of him to be aware that when he's like this, you can't get him to talk just by wishing it, or from hoping that he's going to snap out of it. You have to wait.

It's a lot like trying to tame an animal. You have to teach it that it can trust you and that takes time. You sit there, give it food and as time goes by it learns not to be afraid of you. It learns that you aren't going to hurt it or damage it in any way. Or at least that's the way I always thought about taming animals.

No, that's not right. It's nothing like taming animals. What it's like is trying to make friends with someone who has been betrayed by the closest of friends.

That's what it's like.

I don't know why Kerrass began to... began to feel the way he did. He's never really talked about it since and I never really asked him to explain it. It seemed, intrusive somehow. I always kind of assumed that if he wanted to talk about whatever it was that was bothering him, then he would talk about it without any kind of input from me although this might have been a mistake with hindsight.

I have a couple of guesses. I suspect that, whoever it was that had died was important to Kerrass. I don't know who it was and I never asked but for whatever reason, that person was important. Friend, teacher, lover or something else but for whatever reason, that loss was a tipping point for Kerrass and what it did was to tip him over the edge towards madness.

Kerrass had often spoken to me about the problems with being a Witcher from the Feline school. That there were problems with the mutations that had been applied to them that meant that they ran the risk of heading towards various forms of psychoses far too easily for comfort. I knew that Kerrass had a temper as I had seen his rage made manifest, aimed at me and at others. I had also seen his depressions. Where he would sink into a pit of despair that nothing could drag him out of.

But this was much slower and more insidious than any of those things. It took it's time and it took that time to build. Slowly. Very very slowly so that by the time I actually realised that something was wrong, there was nothing I could do to try and help him, other than just to be there, ready for him to talk when he needed to talk.

I was waiting a long time.

But as I say, it began slowly and it's only with the benefit of hindsight that I can pick up on clues that might have led me to believe that nothing was ok. But it was small stuff.

I had to remind him to blindfold me, to hide the whereabouts of Kaer Morhen.

That might not sound like much and it possibly isn't but at the same time it had been... it had been important to him when he was on his way in, but now it didn't seem to matter.

He even made a joke of it when we stopped for the night.

“It honestly never occurred to me.” He said after we'd settled down to cook some of the supplies. For those people wondering, the Goat was just as tasty on the second attempt.

“Why not?” I wondered aloud. “You were so determined to remember on the way in.”

“Yes, but I kind of figured that if Letho approved of you then it was kind of alright.”

“Letho approves of me?”

“He certainly seems to.”

“He tortured me Kerrass.”

“Yes, but only in a kind of off-hand affectionate kind of way. If he'd really started torturing you you'd be missing fingers by now.”

“That doesn't make me feel better about it though Kerrass.”

I was drinking a measure of the larger potion bottle at this point.

“He certainly never apologised for it.” I went on.

“He would never apologise. He once told me that he sees apologising as a sign of weakness. All I'll say is this though, he's never given me a knife.”

“It is a good knife.”

“It would be.”

Nothing else was said on the subject.

I was blindfolded for the next couple of days until we were back on the road again. Another, very nondescript patch of road. Nothing different from that patch of road to any of the other patches of road with the miles of wild countryside on the several days either side of it.

What was the next potential clue?

I beat him in a sparring session. The only time I've ever beaten Kerrass enough to score a point on him was when he was demonstrating some kind of technique to me that he wanted me to learn.

But that day, I was using some of the techniques that Letho had taught me and I defeated Kerrass handily. I didn't think too much of it at the time on the grounds that I was trying some new things and I was also swept up in the euphoria of the moment. I enjoyed some jokes at Kerrass' expense for which I was suitably punished.

It was like... It was like he just lost focus somehow. As though the carefully polished and burnished lens of a microscope has developed a flaw in the glass. That someone's dropped it somewhere.

He became less talkative. That's not that much to talk about but at the same time it is a factor. Whereas we had spent a lot of time whiling away the miles over the course of one or other conversation. Now it just seemed as though he was responding with one or two syllables. But as I say, it was a slow thing. It didn't happen quickly. After an afternoon of silence we would spend the entire evening talking about vampires (a subject that was still rather on my mind) or on the mating habits of Wyverns.

But then I looked up one day and I realised that the person who was riding next to me was no longer my friend. I don't know what it was or when it had happened but I realised that I was worried for him and

concerned for his health.

I've already talked about the day Kerrass first called me friend and I didn't say the word aloud until he did because I didn't want to make him feel uncomfortable. But I do know that it was in that stretch of travelling away from kaer Morhen that I first realised that I had started to think of Kerrass as my friend. I knew this because that was when I realised that I was worried about him.

I remember looking over at him, there were some Endregas off in the woods further up the hills. Just one or two and in those kinds of cases they only seem to attack you if you get too close to them but I turned to Kerrass to wonder if there might be someone near by who might be willing to pay for the removal of the beasts.

Kerrass hadn't noticed them. They were too far away for his medallion to really have any kind of effect but he was riding behind me (which should have been another clue as generally he prefers to be in front,) his head was bowed, dark circles under his eyes and his eyes were bloodshot.

If he had been completely human I would have said that he had been weeping for some reason.

He noticed my looking and straightened in the saddle. Just like that, Kerrass the Witcher was back. Then he noticed the Endrega's although there weren't any villages around. Which is a shame because a good hunt was just what the doctor might have ordered in that case.

I can admit that I do have a number of excuses. I had my own series of thought processes to go over and the moral repercussions of what Letho had talked to me about as well as shown me were rather haunting. But I remember that moment. I remember that moment and thinking, “What has Kerrass got to be so unhappy about?” and then realising that the answer has been in front of my fucking face for the past couple of weeks.

A friend of his had died. Someone that he thought of as being important.

This had been told to him in an environment similar to the one where he himself had been tortured and abused within an inch of his life and probably beyond the limit of his own sanity. All of that and in the mean time the poncey scholar that insisted on being dragged around after him, had vanished up his own backside upon learning that Witchers had been forced into existing because the entirety of humanity had been too cowardly to learn how to deal with their own problems.

I was possibly being a little hard on myself but at the same time it wasn't entirely invalid.

That night as we set up the camp fire and after we had done some training where I had made sure that I had asked a suitably large number of questions to keep his mind on things, I decided to broach the subject in a typically ham-fisted and above all, male, fashion.

“You alright?” I asked him after trying several other conversation starters around in my head until I gave up and decided to just force some words out in the same way that an army sends out a group of soldiers into the breach in a castle first, just to see what might happen.

Kerrass shifted his weight and looked up at me.

“Of course I am, why wouldn't I be?”

I stared at him open mouthed for a few minutes.

“Kerrass, not wanting to be funny but I've just been shown the briefest hint of what it's like to go through the trials. I'm not naïve enough to think that that wouldn't have an effect on someone but at the same time... Letho told me that you'd lost someone.”

If anyone reading this has a friend who has recently lost someone or of whom you might suspect that they're not alright. Take note. This is how you DON'T talk to them.

Or maybe you do. I don't know.

“People die Freddie. Witchers more often than that really.”

“Yes but...”

“That's just the truth of life out on the path Freddie. Write that in your book. No Witcher gets off the path peacefully. We all die, I will, you will and the longer we all stay on the path, the more likely it's going to happen violently and sooner rather than later. Why do you think I've tried to leave it so often?”

I've said it before, Kerrass does rage pretty well but this was a lot quieter than I was used to.

The silence lengthened as I realised how badly I had handled the situation. After a while Kerrass got up and walked into the night.

The following morning I tried to talk to him about it. I tried to apologise for my insensitivity but he waved me off.

“Don't worry about it. I just get like this sometimes. You know how it is.” and we rode on. He seemed fine that day but he was...distant is the word I want to use.

It got worse over the coming weeks. We were heading west as the plan was still, in theory, to head back into Redania before heading south to help with the clearing out of the Necrophages in Velen. But Whereas before Kerrass had been looking forward to what he called the “easy money” that would soon be gathered during that time and place. Now he was... Just not there.

I was the one making the decisions. I was picking up food and cooking at it. I had to remind him to train in the evenings. I had to encourage him to go on hunts.

I had plenty of money left over what with one thing and another but Kerrass' own funds were running short. So I had to encourage him to take contracts.

Which he did badly. I had to care for his injuries again, something I hadn't had to do since the night we first met. Normally Kerrass is happy to take a potion and get on with it but he had run out of potions without telling me so I had to use my own leftover medicine knowledge to stitch him up. I had to ask him what herbs he needed to brew some more of his potions and I spent my time trailing round the countryside looking for the flowers, berries and roots that he needed. A thing that he would have refused to let me do for fear that I might pick up on one too many potion secrets. A task, by the way, that Kerrass could have dealt with in a fraction of the time that it took me to perform the same task as, not being very good at it, I ruined more than one sample by inexpert harvesting.

So I did the next load of inexpert attempts to care for my friend.

It should be mentioned that even given the distance of time from those events, I still don't know what I could have said or done to make these circumstances better. Kerrass was suffering. I knew it although I don't recall any particular time that I realised he was suffering. It was a creeping, insidious realisation that the person that I was travelling with was not alright.

So as I said. In trying to help I messed things up even further.

Another camp later on and I came out with this wondrous line.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

We were sat, in amongst some trees, we'd eaten and were in that stage where we were slowly hunkering down to attempt to get some sleep. Kerrass was doing some repair work to his armour. I say that because he had got all of the stuff out to do the repair work but then he was just sat there, staring at the leather knife in a way that was making me nervous. He was just staring at it and had been doing so for some time.

So I asked the question. I don't know why or what possessed me to do so but there it was. The words were out of my mouth now and in the open air.

“Talk about what?” he asked.

“It. Whatever it is that's bothering you.”

“Nothing's bothering me Freddie. Get some rest, long day tomorrow.”

“You keep saying that Kerrass but it isn't going to be is it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that I'll wake up in the morning and you'll have gone off somewhere. I'll spend some time packing up camp, making breakfast and things but you still won't be back. I'll come find you, which I will because you won't really have been paying attention and call your name whereupon you will. Turn around, sword half out of it's scabbard with a face that looks as though you're in pain. In the end we're not going to set off until mid morning at best. Then, we're going to ride down the road, ignoring any kind of monster sign until you declare that it's time to stop in the early evening when we could have clearly gone on for another several hours.”

“All right Freddie that'll do.”

“But then, after I've made camp, which I admit is part of my job, but after you've stood there, watching me do all of that, you just sit down when we should be training.”

“I said that'll do.”

“Because the person that taught me that constant training and practise is the person that no longer seems to care about it.”

“So?”

“So that's my point. Something's bothering you. I don't know what it is but I want to help so I'm seeing if you want to talk about it.”

“Don't you think that if I wanted to talk about I would have done so by now.”

“It certainly doesn't seem that way,”

“Did it ever occur to you, Freddie, that the reason I'm not talking about it is because I don't want to talk to you about it only for you to publish it in one of your papers for random members of the public to comment and nitpick over.”

“All you have to do Kerrass, all you've ever had to do is say, don't publish this bit Freddie, and I would do it. Have I not proven that enough by now?”

“That's not the point.”

“You MADE that point Kerrass. Have I not proved that you can trust me by now. I reminded YOU to blindfold me on the way back from Kaer Morhen remember.”

He stared at me open mouthed.

“What's wrong Kerrass? What happened there? Because you're not yourself.”

“I'm fine.”

“No you're not,”

“I said I'm fine.”

“If you were fine, we wouldn't be arguing about this. I would already be asleep due to the exhaustion that you would have inflicted on me due to your overly zealous training regime.”

Kerrass got up.

“Where are you going?”

“Going off where I can get a bit of peace.”

He stalked off into the trees. At first I was concerned that he might not come back but he had left his other sword, horse and bags at the camp site. I tied a rope from his bags to my foot and got my head down.

I was worried and I didn't know what to do.

I had seen Kerrass sink into depressions before. Normally they lasted for a week or ten days at the absolute worst. He became close mouthed and frowny faced. He became even more exacting in his expectations and one would almost call him....petty in his thinking.

But this was something else.

This was like...It was as though he had forgotten how to be Kerrass and had to keep being reminded as to how to do it. Whether that was by me or by some other force or event. But more and more those events were getting more and more serious. His losing to me during a sparring contest, completely missing a group of monsters on the road. These kinds of things were coming up more and more often. When I pointed them out to him he would get frustrated and snap at me.

But his frustration only grew.

I had decided on a slightly different strategy to deal with him. He was waspish and snapping with sudden outbursts of anger at me. Outbursts for which he was nearly always apologetic but they were happening more and more often. Several times a day I would decide that I should just leave him to it. That I should just turn my horse for home or for the university to get away from him. I privately thought that I had more than enough material for a masters thesis or three and no-one could fault me for calling it quits in the face of so hostile a subject, but at the same time I was worried. Kerrass had once looked after me when I had been seriously ill with a malady of the brain and heart and I felt that I was duty bound to do the same for him.

So I persevered. I toughened my skin a little bit and just left him to it.

I stopped reminding him that we needed to train and instead I would just go through my own set of exercises.

Doing my best to push myself to the limits that had already been established.

I sorted out food, negotiating with merchants for many of the things that I knew that we would need. I decided to pay for a herb-woman to collect a lot of the medicinal compounds that I knew that Kerrass needed or could use as part of his own potion and alchemy craft. But other than that, I just left him to it.

Days would pass when we wouldn't speak. We just headed across the mountains and then turned our horses towards the south. Our only engagement was when I would check the direction of travel with him.

Things finally came to a head when we met the Grave hag.

We came across a notice by the side of the road. A huge tree stood in the middle of several roads and attached to it were various notices, some were talking about the need that this person or that person needed to be captured or killed for the crown. There were also some notices of things for sale but one notice that finally caught my eye was a notice that help was wanted from a nearby village which was losing children. It was a wooden board into which the words had been carved with a chisel or a knife and it had been hung off another nail that had been used to hang a notice about a missing plough.

I wordlessly handed it over to Kerrass. I had given up trying to talk to him by that point as he was finding something to get irritable with in everything that I said. He took it off me and nodded.

We found out where the village was in question. It was utterly ordinary for that part of the world. It had a mill to go with the river that it had been founded next to, an inn and a blacksmith. The mayor was the mill owner and told us, or rather told me about the problems that the village had been plagued with over the last little while. I listened, passed the knowledge onto Kerrass who grunted in response.

We asked around to see if we could find anything out. Spoke to some of the parents who had lost children to see what kind of upset they were.

In these cases, especially in the more famine stricken, poorer corners of the world after the war, when winter's hard and there isn't going to be enough food to go around, sometimes parents make the impossible choice, how do they want their children to die. Long and slow from starvation or nice and quick, flash of a blade, bite of a bear or wild dog... I'm sure you get the idea.

This time, as it turned out the villagers were quite well off with respect to food. They had managed to get that sweet spot of being slightly too far from the war front to have been stripped of ALL of their supplies and had a bit put by. A lot of the men of the village had gone off to war so there was a little more child labour than was strictly ok with me but I am no longer quite so naïve as to believe that children are not just as capable of making the hard choices when it's a choice between ploughing the fields or starving.

But a few children had gone missing.

There are any number of reasons that children might go missing and as we investigated in an effort to try and figure out what it was that had taken these children, oh joy of joys, I began to see Kerrass return to his old self.

It was a slow thing at first. I first thought I saw a glimpse of that old Witcher when I saw his eyes glinting while talking to a woman who was openly weeping at the prospect of a lost son. Then again when he found a track on a patch of ground outside the window. Then again when he found another set of tracks leading from a house that had lost a girl child.

I remember the moment when I started to think that everything was going to be ok. He was looking at the ground and I saw his head look up at the tree line a few hundred yards away and I saw a kind of hunger cross his face, along with a righteous anger that I had missed.

Never let it be said that Kerrass is completely immune to the lure of being a hero. The prospect of children in peril is strong and the urge to rescue them came upon him then.

The following day we went into the woods. We had a couple of places to try to find signs of any of the beasts that might be praying on the children. There were some local caves, the old charcoal burners huts and an abandoned witches hut, abandoned because some of the more zealous members of the church of the holy fire had been through and dragged the woman out to die screaming on the fires of the priests fury.

We found nothing at the cave and the hut of the old witch had been burned down so that nothing useful could be left there, Kerrass' amulet failed to even twitch so we moved onto the charcoal burners huts.

That was where we found her.

But what I had thought was Kerrass finally coming back to himself was something else entirely. It nearly went oh so catastrophically wrong.

One of the things that you have to remember about Grave Hags is that they are not completely stupid. They do have some small vestiges of intelligence. Some of them have even been known to talk in small ways and can be communicated with. They set themselves up, often near Grave yards or other areas where large numbers of otherwise well decomposed bodies can be found before eating those same bodies. However they are occasionally known to capture people and kill them in stages so that they can decompose properly to be suitably palatable to the foul wretches.

They seem to mimic human behaviour in many ways. They live in abandoned huts and near grave sites or the sites of mass burials. They also may bear some kind of distant relation to vampiric species as some of the potions (according to Kerrass) that injure vampires also injure Grave Hags although there has never been a proper scientific study of this and so it might just be similarities or coincidence. The important part about this in the case of this tale is due to the fact that they are able to reason enough to be able to recognise the wisdom of “setting stores by” for harder times.

In this case the Grave hag had been systematically capturing young children and keeping them in cages so that they could be her “winter stores.” We learned this through talking to the children afterwards. She fed them and looked after them but didn't understand why the children didn't want to eat decomposing rat as the Grave hag in question seemed to consider such things a delicacy.

The children told us that she would take a child from the dark or when they were gathering firewood in ones and twos, lock them in the cellar to the charcoal burners hut and then kill them, one at a time, one every two or three days. That wasn't including those children who had died of starvation or dehydration.

Now...

In these cases it is foolish to underestimate the monster. A grave hag is one of those opponents that if the monster hunter is properly prepared for such a beast, then the grave hag poses minimal threat.

If, however, the hunter goes in under-prepared or is taken by surprise then an angry Grave hag is not a creature that can be taken lightly.

So we approached the Charcoal burners huts cautiously as it was the last place that we were looking in as next we would have been forced to comb the woods systematically. But as we approached I felt, rather than heard, Kerrass begin to growl.

There is no other word that really does justice to the sound that emanated out from Kerrass' throat. It was a low growl of rage and hate and a pain that can no longer be silenced.

He drew his silver sword and charged in towards one of the huts.

He was unprepared. There were no oils on his blade, no potions in his system and it was only because I had reminded him to that he was wearing his silver sword as well as the steel one. A state that time after time after time was a thing that Kerrass warned me against.

“Always be prepared Freddie,” he would say over and over again.

To make matters even worse. It was beginning to get dark which is when the Grave hag is at her most powerful.

I swore but I didn't have time to think too much. If I had stopped to think then things might have gone a lot worse.

I ran in after Kerrass. I saw him kick down the door into the hut and rush inside.

On some kind of level, I registered the thing that Kerrass had heard which was that we could hear children's voices. As I got to the hut the side of the hut exploded outwards as Kerras and the hag came tumbling out. I later learned that the hag had heard Kerrass coming, had flung some kind of goo into his face which had blinded him before making a powerful leap at him which carried them through the thin, wattle and daub, walls of the hut.

Now the screams of the children could plainly be heard. I ran in, saw the hole in amongst the filth and dirt and dashed over. I could hear Kerrass roaring something and the monster screaming. I fell to me knees. The hole was just deep enough that the children couldn't climb out themselves. I jumped down and lifted up one of the larger boys to the top to help the others out. Fortunately he was a solid lad and seemed to have taken some form of charge of the others so I was able to quickly hand the other children up and he helped them out.

I could still hear Kerrass although he was no longer shouting, now he was screaming. I couldn't hear the monster.

I picked up the couple of remaining children and almost bodily threw them out of the hole before I used my new dagger which I plunged into the side of the hole to lever myself out. Not the use that Letho had intended it for I have no doubt but at the time I wasn't thinking of that. It didn't break under my weight though and I still have it so that says something about his skill at forging. The children were frozen and milling around in terror and I had to herd them out of the door.

I smelled burning but I didn't have time to check. I grabbed the eldest lad, demanded to know if he knew the way home. He nodded and started leading the other crying children away with my chasing after them.

I didn't look back.

We broke through the tree line so that we could see the village down below. By now mothers and grandparents had begun to see us and were running up towards the children. Deciding that they were safe, I turned and ran back to see what had become of Kerrass.

He was standing over the remains of the Grave Hag. He had forced the creature back against a wall and was now intent on hacking it into pieces.

He was screaming. Spittle flying from his mouth in thin streamers of slime.

The thing was dead. As dead as a thing like that can be but Kerrass kept on chopping at it. The sounds that he was making were like the sounds of a wounded animal. Formless rage and pain.

As I approached he made a gesture and a stream of sparks sent flames to lick up against the creatures body. I thought that might be the end of things but Kerrass just kept chopping. Just hacking down, both hands on the hilt of the sword.

I approached slowly. I had dropped my spear which might have been foolish but I judged that Kerrass had lost his grip on his senses and if he saw a man with a spear then he might take that as a threat and react without thinking.

I approached slowly, gently calling his name.

He just kept screaming. Visibly tiring before my eyes. The blows were getting clumsier and cruder. I saw him gesture to cause more sparks but whatever was in him that he used to throw those sparks had left him and nothing happened.

Instead he just kept chopping and chopping.

I called his name again, inching closer but I couldn't tell if he had heard me or not.

He was getting really tired now. I was under no illusions, Kerrass could easily split me in half without really trying, even exhausted as he was. He couldn't lift the sword any more even with both hands.

He had one last burst of violent energy where he kicked the Hag's corpse a few times, such as it was by this point, but by that point I was close enough to catch his sword arm and take it off him before he did himself an injury with it.

He tried to get angry at me but he was too far gone.

Instead he kind of collapsed into me and howled into my cloak as I caught him.

I'll never forget the sounds that he made that day as we stood there in that little clearing that the charcoal burners had made. They were animal, primal sounds...

I...

Flame burn me...

It was fully dark by the time that he stopped keening.

I don't know how long after that but a tiny small voice came from him “Freddie?”

“I'm here Kerrass.”

“Take me away from this place.”

It wasn't easy. I lit a quick fire and fed it some fuel so that I could find the place again before I slung Kerrass over my shoulder and carried him to the abandoned cottage of the old herb woman on a bed made from my cloak and his. I quickly lit a fire in the old hearth and headed back out into the night.

I went to the village first. They had heard Kerrass' shouts and cries from as far as that. There was an adorable little blockade of men, women and children with rakes and scythes keeping a watch out.

I mock but those people did right by Kerrass and I.

The children had made it back safely. They gave me the payment that they'd promised as well as several bottles of apple brandy and some food. I tried to pay them for it but they insisted that I take the money instead. I also managed to get a small bottle of lamp oil from them and the rest of our belongings.

Next I went back to the place where Kerrass had fought the Hag. Using the oil I set a good sized fire both in the hut and over the body of the hag itself which I shoveled up and threw into the burning building. Just for surety I covered the body with salt as well. Not that that's going to do anything against a hag but it made me feel better.

I spent enough time there to make sure that the fire wasn't going to spread from the old hut to the surrounding trees before I turned our horses back towards the abandoned cottage.

Kerrass was asleep but woke when I entered. He looked like I had startled a wild animal. His eyes were wild and his ears were tilted backwards. He looked terrified.

With slow and careful movements I went over to the fireplace and started making some food. I wasn't foolish enough to try and give it directly to Kerrass but I put it down next to him and was pleased when I saw that he had started eating.

In all we spent three days in that abandoned cottage. On the morning of the third day I woke to find that he had left his bed roll. Worried, I went out to look for him and I found that he had built a huge fire in the clearing near the cottage. There, stripped down to his trousers he was working the sword forms. Slowly, his movements were stiffer than I guessed he would have preferred but he was getting through them. He would grimace at the mistakes before moving on. Later that day I took my spear outside and we ran through some basic exercises.

On the fourth day we rode out.

It wasn't until the night that we visited the brothel that Kerrass talked about those few days again.

I was having a rest from all the debauchery.

While entirely pleasant, debauchery is a lot of hard work. Endlessly amusing and rewarding work it might be but at the same time, it can be exhausting. I had gone in search of some liquid refreshment as I was in danger of falling asleep and I wasn't quite ready to give up on the evening just yet so I had decided to leave the room, relieve myself and get some more wine as well as some water. To all intents and purposes the brothel that we were at was having a relatively quiet night and so Kerrass' decree that I should be treated like a king meant that the best party was in my room.

I had already had a good time and was determined to have some more when I was walking past a small alcove which opened out onto a balcony when I saw Kerrass. There was another woman who was lying asleep on a nearby couch where someone, presumably Kerrass, had covered her with a blanket and placed a pillow beneath her head. Kerrass had a glass in one hand and was sipping from it as he watched the night sky. He was dressed in his shirt and trews but his feet were bare and propped up on the railing around the balcony.

“You alright?” I asked.

He smiled up at me. He looked better, the bags under his eyes were no longer as large or dark and he seemed relaxed, almost content. “You need to stop asking me that Freddie.”

“Call it habit.”

Kerrass waved me towards a chair next to him and offered me a glass.

“Taking a break?” He asked.

“Something like that. The royal treatment is very....” I rotated my hand in the air, lost for words.

“Royal?” suggested Kerrass.

“That's the very word I was looking for,”

Kerrass clinked his glass against mine.

“Well you deserve it.” he said.

“If you say so,”

“No need for modesty now Freddie,”

“Ok.” I shrugged and took a drink. The wine was excellent. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“This again?”

“This again.”

“You know one day you're going to run out of questions to ask me.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Still I won't pry if you don't want to go into it.”

Kerrass heaved a huge sigh and settled in.

Truth be told I had just made up my mind to get up and return to my own chamber to wake up the other women were were waiting there when he started speaking again.

“You saved me from the final trial.” He said quietly.

“What trial is that?”

He looked over at me as though he was surprised to have spoken.

“The trial. The ultimate trial. The final trial.”

“I didn't know there were any more trials. So far I've got the trial of Choice, The trial of the Grasses, the trial of Dreams and the Trial of the Mountain.”

“Yes, well. There are two more trials that we generally don't like to talk about.”

“Two more? Those trials sound harsh enough as it is. Hells but Letho showed me some of them and I'm still terrified of it.”

Kerrass smiled again. It was a sad smile. “Yes, I was angry with him about that for a while but, I dunno. He was right. I do look back upon those times with fondness. I do look back and think about the other teachers and the other students. The wizard that stood over us maintaining the proper flow of chemicals into our blood streams. At the time it was a nightmare from which I could never wake up. But now, I look back and I find that I am grateful to those people. Heh,”

He poured himself some more wine and offered me the jug.

“When I say it aloud like that, it sounds psychotic. That I am grateful to them for abusing and changing me in the most unnatural ways. That I am happy with that history and can remember the good times with fondness and the bad times I find that I skip over in my brain. But those aren't the trials that I'm talking about.”

“Oh?” I passed the jug back.

“These are the trials that we don't talk about. They're not coded in any book that I've ever read and other than the old man who talked to me about them once when I returned to the keep after a particularly long year, I've never heard anyone talk about them. Not even to each other.”

I said nothing. I had the sense that Kerrass was working up to telling me something important and I just wanted to let him speak while at the same time trying to drag my own brain out of whatever alcohol soaked bath it was in at the time so I could pay attention.

“These are the trials that mark the change of someone from being a young Witcher. Just sent out on the path with the shine still on his medallion. Still carrying the swords on his back proudly and getting ready to fight anyone who looks at them badly. The first of the two trials is this one and believe it or not, you've passed this trial yourself.”

I still said nothing although my eyebrows may have raised.

“I once heard a fencing instructor refer to is as “The trial of the sword,” or “The trial of the hero,”.” Kerrass went on. “What happens is that the young Witcher goes out. He's at the peak of his trained skill. He's passed all the tests, his mind is full of Monster Lore and Herb Lore. The lessons of his training are still fresh in his mind and in his body. He has a sword on his back and he knows how to use it which is a considerable distance from the skills of all the people around him. He looks around him in his brand spanking new Witcher armour and thinks that he's better than the lot of them.

“Then something happens. It might be that someone bumps into them on the street or someone sneers at them when they are enquiring after contracts. The White Wolf tells a story about his first monster where he rescued a girl and her father from a rape gang before the girl and father fled after the attackers.

“So sometimes the trial comes in the opportunity to be a hero when you shouldn't. You see a situation and you think to yourself. “I have a sword and I know how to use it. I don't need to be afraid of these people, they should be afraid of me.” Then that arrogance gets you killed. To pass this trial you simply have to survive it. Survive it, realise how utterly stupid you were, realise that you are not immortal and adjust your own thinking accordingly.”

“So in my case. That time I ran into a clearing to rescue that girl and those bandits could have skewered me.”

“Precisely. You survived. You're going to be much more cautious and considerate in the future aren't you?”

“Yes,”

“So you passed your “Trial of the sword.” History is replete with examples of this if you know what you're looking for. The perfect warrior at the peak of his training and his conditioning. Dripping in plate and chain armour and then he gets run through by a farmer with a pitchfork. Another favourite story of mine is of the farmer and the swordsman have you heard this one?”

“Is this the story about Geralt and the...”

“No no. It's one of those stories that gets told to warn people of being arrogant. The story goes that the soldier takes a fancy to the farmers wife. Invents an excuse to challenge the farmer to a duel the following day. The farmer goes off to town and finds an ancient master of the sword and says “Master what do I do? I need to protect my wife from being killed by this soldier.”

“The master laughs and shows him one move. Sword held nice and high then bring it crashing down on the enemies head. The master makes the farmer practice the move over and over again until he literally performs the move in his sleep.

“In the morning the farmer asks the master “When should I use the strike?” and the master tells him. “Start the fight with the sword held high. Then when the other man runs you through with his own sword, he will be exposed and you can kill him.”

““But won't I die?” the farmer asks, plainly terrified.

““But your wife will be protected,” says the master.

“The farmer is terrified but he goes to the site of the duel. Lifts his sword on high into the stance that he has been taught. The soldier arrives. Takes one look at the stance and surrenders to the farmer.”

“It's an interesting story.” I said. “I have heard it before and thought it was about having the will to succeed against all odds.”

“But it's also about, not rushing into a situation without getting all the facts and circumstances correct. But anyway. That's the trial of the sword. It's the moment when you stop being an “Apprentice Witcher,” and start being a Witcher.

“The last trial though.” Kerrass went on. “The final trial. That is the trial that separates the Witcher from the Master Witcher. I don't remember the circumstances that led to my passing that trial but I remember returning to Feline keep. I will have been on the path for maybe ten years or so, somewhere around there, anyway.... I walked into the keep and got myself cleaned up. The other Witchers were talking, rolling dice, playing cards, bullying the students and the for some reason, I didn't want to join them. I wanted some peace and Quiet and I left them to it. I got some food and went to sit outside somewhere where I could smell the fresh breeze rather than the stale smell of unwashed Witcher.

“I was sat outside and a Witcher came to me. I had never spoken to him but he was old. Still hale and hearty. I had seen him around but never talked to him as he had nothing to do with apprentices. He gave me a bottle of apple brandy and told me about the last trial.

“He called it “The Trial of Death.” I remember wanting to laugh at him for such a melodramatic name but he was absolutely serious and I found that I didn't want to laugh any more. Instead for the first time since I had been given my medallion. Indeed for the first time since I had passed the trials, I found that I wanted to weep. My tears came in a while and he watched me for a long time before telling me that there is no shame in those tears. That all Witchers feel that feeling at some point in their lifetimes. He told me that I would be able to recognise it in the others. That I would see it in them when they have their own experience with the trial of death. He told me that mastering that trial was the difference between being a Witcher and being a Master Witcher.

“He was right too. I found that I could see that feeling in the other men at the keep. I saw it in the Wolven keep as well when I went to visit and have seen it in the other Witchers on the path as well.

“As far as I know it's a thing that's unique to Witchers. I've never seen that look in the eye of any other man or woman from any species. It's a Witchers gaze and it might have something to do with why people think that we are emotionless.

“Our job is death. It's all there is. It's our task, our calling and our profession. It's our reason to exist. Without death and the occasional need for that death to be visited on the monsters of this world then Witchers would not need to exist.

“This is complicated stuff so bear with me as I tell it.

“In all aspects of our lives, we walk beside death. The oils that we pour on our swords are caustic and corrosive. The potions that we drink are poison. We are all made using a process that brings death, far more often than it brings life. Our tools are weapons of death and we bring that death with an efficiency that would terrify most men.

“Then as well, when we are given our prey. We stalk our prey in the same way that someone might woo a partner. We look at them. We study them. Trying to guess how they think and what they feel. Trying to guess how they are going to react. But then we go further than that. A suitor can walk away if they decide that there is no compatibility whereas we have to find that compatibility. Then, on the night of the hunt. We dance with our intended. We lock swords with claws in the same way that lovers might link hands and lips. But then, different to lovers again, one of us dies. Whether our betrothed in death, or ourselves. Then we move onto our next dance partner.

“And we know that that death is going to come for us. Sooner or later some monster is going to get lucky. Sooner or later we are going to jump left when we should have jumped right and the monster will have us. We become addicted to that feeling. That excitement. That... That challenge of making sure that we are the ones that survive. To make sure that we are the superior hunter, the superior predator.... the superior.....

“Letho has a line that he likes to use. He once said to me that “What was done to us was monstrous and they turned us into monsters?”

“Yes, he did use that line.”

“Well it's true. We have to be the superior monster. Every hunt is our dance with death and after a while, that sense of feeling that you get when you're locked in combat with a monster. That.... That rush. It becomes addictive. So even when you might try to leave the path. The path draws you back into your dance with death.

“But then something changes. You begin to get tired. You've been on the path for years. Time after time after time it goes the same way. You approach the village. The village throws cow shit at you, you move on. You approach the village, the village throws horse shit at you, you move on.

“You approach the village, they have a contract. You negotiate a price. You perform the hunt. The village tries to swindle you at best, kill you at worst and then you ask yourself.... What's the point. Killing these monsters for ungrateful people who work far too hard for ungrateful lords who refuse to lift a finger to help them leaving all the dirty work to you and yours. So why are we out here, in the dark, alone, terrified and waiting for the feel of the monsters jaws to close around your leg.

“It's a slow insidious feeling. You know all the reasons why people are the way they are. Why they are prejudiced the way they are and why they behave the way they do. But at the same time, you find that you hate them for it.

“But still you dance because there's no other option.

“But isn't there?

“What if... What if there was another option. What if... instead of bringing death to some monster who doesn't know any better what if... What if they brought death to you instead?

“You banish that thought. “We are Witchers,” you think to yourself, “It is our duty to go into the dark and to fight the fear and the terror and to stare death in the eye and spit in his face.

“But you're so damn tired. Your friends are dying now. Maybe they weren't quite as good as you but suddenly there are only two out of the five of you that survived your class still standing. Good men all. Better than you even. What made you survive and them die? What's it like anyway, to die?

“Slowly, it becomes all you think about. You're tired. You want to stop. No-one will blame you. No-one will think twice about it. You just...you were unlucky this time.

“It will be so easy after all. Just go down there, step into the blow rather than away from it and no-one will ever know. With enough potions in yourself you probably wouldn't even feel it.

“Then. When you're at that point. That point when you want death. When you pray for it even. You turn away, kill that monster and force yourself on to the next village and the next and the next until the end of the year and do the same again the next year and the next.

“That's the trial of death. You will never face that Freddie, you can walk away from these things at any time, back to your life and your family. Soldiers know that the war will end eventually. Mercenaries can retire so they don't feel this. This feeling is reserved for Witchers.

“That is the final trial. If you can survive that trial then you are a master Witcher. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said simply.

Kerrass nodded. “Precisely.”

He shook his head. “Don't mind me, Freddie, I'll be fine tomorrow. Go back to the women, they'll be wondering where you are.”

I left him on the balcony that night and sure enough, he was fine the following morning although I was tired and sore. Pleasantly so as it had been an incredible evening.

Three weeks later we received word of my father's death.

It's a long time since that night in the brothel and I still don't understand what to make of it all and I suspect I never will. Perhaps that is for the best.