The steading had been a small farm, then a fire, then whatever this was.
It had three walls, a partial roof, and a corner where the second wall met the third that was dry because the roof above it was still mostly intact.
The corner smelled of old hay and charcoal.
Adam checked the perimeter before he let them stop — the road north was visible from the east-facing gap in the first wall, the tree line was forty meters west, nothing moved in either direction.
He’d been checking perimeters for thirty hours without sleeping.
His legs knew it before his mind did.
They ate the last of the food a passing woman had pressed on them two miles back — a heel of hard bread, broken in half.
He gave Ciri the larger half, which she accepted without comment, which told him she was tired enough that the arithmetic of the exchange hadn’t registered or she’d done it and decided the larger half was appropriate for a growing girl over a refugee boy with white hair.
He ate his half in four bites and tried not to think about the fact that his body was still running on whatever it had started the day on, which was nothing.
The bread was the best thing he’d tasted in a month.
Ciri ate hers in two bites and was asleep against the wall corner in approximately three minutes, which was the sleep of someone who was thirteen and had been running since before dawn and had used up everything they had on staying alive and sharp and had nothing left for being awake.
She didn’t make herself small when she slept, which he’d half-expected.
She slept like someone who was used to taking up her full portion of space.
He sat across from her and reached for the Sight.
It had been a habit for thirty-two days — the reflex of someone who had known how this went and was now living it, always bracing for what came next.
He reached the way you reached for a phone in a dark room, not really thinking about it, expecting it to be there.
He found the burn.
Not the first one, the first burn, the cluster of foreknowledge he’d traded for forty refugees in a lane.
That one had had edges — a specific absence, a soft grey blank he could map the perimeter of because the knowledge around it was still present.
This was different.
This was what you found when you opened a book and the pages were there but the ink had faded to nothing: the structure intact, the shape of what had been, the utter absence of the content.
The Fall had cost him the most, and the most was most of it.
He sat with this for a long time.
The road north.
He’d planned it in his head for three weeks — the route that went past Dorian, past the junction at the Kestrel marshes, up toward the passes that let into Kaedwen, eventually toward a fortress in the mountains that he’d never seen except in two cutscenes and a game-engine render.
He reached for the specific beat he’d been planning around — a patrol-free window at the northern junction, the scout report he’d memorized from the second season, something about a bridge being out that would force Nilfgaard to take the eastern loop and give refugees a day of unobstructed movement.
There was nothing there.
More like: he was certain something had been there, certain the way you were certain of a dream that had already faded, able to feel the shape of the certainty without the contents.
The bridge.
The junction.
Some window, some beat that he’d been counting on to make the next two weeks navigable.
Grey.
Soft.
Gone.
He pressed his back against the second wall and breathed and did the calculation that was left to him.
He knew the broad shape.
Kaer Morhen existed and was in the Kaedwen mountains and was where the Witchers wintered and was where Geralt would eventually bring Ciri in the canonical version of events.
He knew that he needed to get Ciri to Geralt, and he knew that Geralt was moving north from somewhere south of Temeria on a timeline that was now months rather than weeks, and he knew that the winter passes into Kaedwen closed in the first heavy snow.
These facts were still there.
These he could still reach.
The granular detail — the specific patrols, the specific windows, the specific beats that had made his plan feel like a plan rather than a direction — was gone.
Which meant that the plan wasn’t a plan anymore.
It was a direction.
He could navigate a direction.
He’d been navigating Cintra’s lower city with no foreknowledge for thirty-two days.
He knew how to read a road.
What he could not do was admit to Ciri that the map he’d implied he had was now mostly smoke.
An outrider patrol passed the east-facing gap in the first wall at the third hour past midnight — he heard the hoofbeats in plenty of time to wake Ciri with a touch and get them both flat and still.
The patrol didn’t stop.
It was the fourth patrol he’d tracked since they’d sheltered in the steading, which meant the search grid was active but not converging, which meant they hadn’t yet identified this corner of the fields as significant, which meant the concealment was holding for now.
Ciri woke at his touch and was immediately silent and alert, which was again the behavior of someone who had been learning, for her entire short life, that alertness was survival.
He noted it.
“Educated guessing,” he said.
“That’s still guessing.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment.
He could feel her thinking — not the vague sense of someone-near-me-is-thinking, but the unmistakable hum of a precise mind in the dark doing rapid calculation.
“You’re not going to tell me what you actually know,” she said.
“No.”
“But you know something.”
He said nothing, which was the answer.
“Fine,” she said.
Which was not acceptance — he’d learned that already, in fourteen hours of traveling with her.
Fine from Ciri meant I am filing this for later and the account will come due.
She was going back to sleep, not because she’d forgiven the non-answer but because sleep was the sensible thing to do when shelter was available and the patrol had just passed and the next one was probably an hour away.
He sat awake after she settled, and tried once more to find the northern ford he’d been planning around — the one where the bridge was out, or not out, or patrolled, or not patrolled, whatever he’d known about it.
There was nothing there.
A candle with most of its wick burned through.
He could see the flame, faint and getting fainter, and could not read anything by it except that the room around it was very large and mostly dark.
Figure it out when you get there, he told himself.
That’s all anyone ever does.
He believed this.
He’d have preferred to believe it with a full Sight behind him.
Ciri’s breathing was the slow rhythm of someone actually asleep, and across the ruined steading a mouse ran along the base of the third wall and disappeared into the ash, and somewhere to the south, miles away, the city that had been on fire was still on fire, because that kind of burning took days.
He thought, once, about the tannery roof and the chalk-dust and Pell asking about the tricks, and then he stopped thinking about it.
One problem at a time.
He watched the east-facing gap in the wall until he was too tired to watch it, and then he slept for three hours, and in that time no further patrols passed, which was all he could have asked.