Water was heavy.
Adam had known this in the abstract, the way you knew things you’d never had to prove on your body.
Two buckets on a shoulder-yoke, full — he’d worked that out to somewhere around forty pounds, though the yoke was badly balanced and the right shoulder was taking more than half, and the street from the pump in the lower square up to the market-quarter was fifty meters of uphill cobble.
He’d done it four times this morning.
His back had opinions.
The carriers’ guild used boys his age for this, which was the only reason the guild-man had considered him at all before turning him away.
The consideration had lasted about ninety seconds.
It had ended when Adam failed to produce either a guild token or a bribe.
He’d gone back to the pump anyway and done it without guild sanction, because the city needed water carried and people who needed water carried were not generally particular about credentials, and by the third trip he’d worked out a route that avoided the guild-man’s usual post, and by the fourth trip he’d gotten close enough to the keep road to see the way the supply chain worked.
The keep road was the only route up from the lower city to the castle approach.
Wide enough for two carts, walled on both sides, guarded at the bottom by a gate-sergeant and at the midpoint by a pair of soldiers with the look of men who did not find their posting interesting.
The guild’s carriers went up in small groups of three or four, escorted by a keep steward, and came back down empty-handed inside twenty minutes.
The gate-sergeant checked guild tokens on the way up.
On the way down he was less attentive — empty carriers coming back were a supply-chain admin problem, not a security one.
In, Adam noted, requires a token.
Out might not, if the timing is right.
He carried the fourth load to a widow on the upper market who paid him two coppers and a piece of hard cheese and told him he was too thin and that his employer was a criminal for sending a boy that size.
Adam told her he’d pass it along, pocketed the coppers, and ate the cheese immediately on the street corner because the yoke had cost more than two trips had earned back.
The bard arrived into his afternoon the way bards apparently arrived into everything: with a song half-started and an audience problem.
He’d set up on the corner near the old fountain — a man of perhaps twenty-five with the kind of easy handsomeness that had probably worked better before the city started filling with refugees who had nothing to spend and less patience for entertainment.
His lute was good.
His current audience was a dog and a small girl who had fallen asleep against the fountain’s base.
He was performing with complete sincerity to this group, which Adam found both absurd and, in some way he couldn’t quite locate, admirable.
The song was about Cintra’s golden age.
It had a very nice verse about the harbor at dawn and the strength of the Cintran navy.
The navy that would, Adam knew, fail to stop Nilfgaard’s land approach in approximately six days.
Adam stood at a distance and listened because his back needed a rest and the bard was genuinely good and the city was going to burn and a man performing earnestly to a sleeping child and a dog was the kind of detail that made history feel less like a fact and more like something that happened to people.
The bard noticed him between verses.
“The reluctant audience!” he announced, with the cheerful aggression of a performer who had decided that the reluctant ones were actually the most interesting.
“Come, come — it’s free, I’m only charging for opinions, and yours look worth collecting.”
“You’re playing a victory song,” Adam said, “in a city that’s about to lose.”
The bard looked at him for a moment.
Something in his face sharpened — not offense, something quicker and more curious than that.
He plucked a single chord, let it die, and then plucked it again.
“You’re the second person to say that to me today,” he said.
“Everyone else in the lower quarter is telling me to be cheerful.
You and a wine merchant, who I’m choosing to believe is very well-informed and not simply pessimistic.”
“The wine merchant’s probably right.”
“How would a water-carrier’s boy know.”
Adam glanced at the yoke he was still holding.
“Loose talk at the pump.”
The bard studied him the way a man studies a thing he means to keep — expressions, rumors, details — and went still at being handed something he hadn’t expected.
Then he reached into his coat and produced a turnip.
“Trade,” he said.
“One vegetable for one piece of actual news.
Not gossip.
Something true.”
Adam needed the food.
His back hurt.
He had twenty minutes before he needed to be somewhere else, and this man — who did not yet know his name, whose lute case had three different cities’ dust on it, whose coat had been expensive once and now had a careful mend on the left elbow — was going to end up on the road north eventually, carrying bad songs into the teeth of a war, and that was going to matter to Adam later in ways that didn’t need explanation now.
“The harvest east of the city,” Adam said.
“Ask about it when you’re deciding whether to stay.”
The bard absorbed this, gave him the turnip, and leaned back against the fountain with his lute across his knee.
“I heard something in return,” he said, more quietly.
“About a witcher.
South of Temeria, the last I had it, but that was three weeks old and moving north.
White hair, two swords, very bad for everyone who finds him inconvenient.” A small pause.
“Someone in this city is very inconvenient to certain interests, from what I gather.”
Adam said nothing.
He ate the turnip.
The bard watched him not-react and let himself look satisfied; he’d gotten the answer he was looking for.
“Well,” the bard said.
“I may write a song about all this.
The tragic kind.
Much more popular than the cheerful ones, in my experience.” He plucked a chord.
“When things get difficult — and they will — the south road’s going to fill up with everyone who waited too long.
The north road’s going to fill with everyone who didn’t wait.
Both will be terrible.
I personally plan to go north, because I am an optimist about terrible things.”
Adam stood up, collected the yoke.
“Good luck with the song.”
“Good luck with whatever you’re doing that you’re not telling me about.”
He went.
The witcher was south of Temeria, three weeks ago.
Moving north, which was what you did if you were a witcher on the Path and the Path kept running into Nilfgaardian patrols and you had enough sense to follow the trouble rather than wait for it to find you.
Three weeks old and moving north meant Geralt of Rivia was somewhere on the roads between here and there, and Adam’s rough estimate of the canon put him arriving at Cintra around the Fall or just after — which meant he was coming and he was behind schedule and he would not be in time to stop it, only in time to walk through the burning.
He’ll find her in the chaos, Adam thought.
If I find her first, what does that mean for the finding?
He didn’t have an answer.
He shelved it.
The keep wall was visible from the road’s highest point in the lower market, and Adam paused there because he was tired and his back was loudly unhappy and he had two coppers and the remnants of a turnip and approximately six days until everything changed.
The keep wall was old dressed stone, crenellated, with a parapet walkway and, on the east face, a narrow tower window at roughly the height of the upper residential floor.
The flag of Cintra’s golden lion hung from the corner tower.
Below the window, the parapet walkway was visible from this angle, and on the walkway — for perhaps ten seconds, before a guard’s hand came out and pulled firmly backward — a small figure stood looking south.
Ash-gray hair.
A child’s height.
Then the hand, and the figure gone.
Adam stood in the market road with a water-yoke across his shoulders, looking at an empty parapet, and felt the six-day clock do something it hadn’t done before: it stopped being a number and became a weight.
She’s up there, he thought, and the host is already counting the postern gate, and the man who’s supposed to find her in the burning is three weeks south and moving, and the arithmetic landed somewhere specific.
He was the only person in the lower city who knew all three of those facts at once.
He started walking.