New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤
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Clearly, Lambert’s spectacular and fragrant return the previous night had not pleased the innkeeper, who was neither lame nor named Nat.
The next day, the witcher and the boy left Lame Nat’s without lingering.
After a quick stop at a blacksmith’s to patch Lambert’s armor, they rode out of Ard Carraigh and continued toward Ban Ard.
Ard Carraigh and Ban Ard were two of Kaedwen’s largest cities, so the road between them was in excellent condition.
Even Trusty moved with a lighter step, head high in the wind, as if he had suddenly remembered noble blood somewhere in his line.
***
That night, as usual, they camped off the roadside.
After their daily sword practice, they sat beside the fire with a supper of rabbit and wild greens, prepared in limited quantity by Chef Marek.
“Have I mentioned that I like your new haircut?” Lambert asked after draining the last drop of broth from his bowl.
He smacked his lips, still not quite satisfied.
Marek had finished eating long before.
He was grinding plants gathered along the road into a simple salve.
At the question, he looked up with little patience.
“If you’re about to mock me, I suggest you reconsider.
Men with receding hairlines don’t get to laugh at other people’s hair.”
“Dogshit, Marek.
You can’t bristle like a hedgehog every time someone says something.
That bowl cut you had before wasn’t bad, exactly, but this is better.
Same side part as Eskel, only yours looks much better.
It suits you.
Truly.
From the heart.”
Lambert sounded offended, as if he had suffered a grave injustice.
Marek gave him a suspicious look, then shook his head.
“Fine.
I apologize.
You hadn’t actually started mocking me yet.
That was preventive self-defense.
As for bristling like a hedgehog, right back at you.”
Having received his apology, Lambert nodded in satisfaction.
“Right.
Shame your face is too ordinary to deserve such excellent hair.”
Marek’s calm expression said he had expected nothing less.
“One day, that mouth of yours will get you hanged.”
The witcher only shrugged.
“Speaking of salves, what’s that one for?”
“Secret.”
***
“What’s this salve for?” Marek had asked, taking the small box Vesemir handed him.
“Lubrication,” Vesemir said kindly.
“Rub it on the inside of your thighs.
Works well.”
That conversation had happened in the stables the day before Marek left Kaer Morhen.
The old witcher had given him not only the salve, but the formula.
Most of the herbs could be found along any roadside, and the fat did not need to be anything special.
For someone riding long distance for the first time, Marek had been deeply grateful.
He could easily imagine what would happen if Lambert found him walking bowlegged from rubbed-raw skin.
The man would grin wide enough to split his face.
Lambert had the sort of crooked personality that expressed concern through insult, like a child teasing the person he liked.
After wiping his steel sword with a soft dry cloth and spreading a thin layer of oil along the blade, Lambert used his bundle as a pillow and lay back beneath the stars.
The Winter Maiden hung bright overhead.
“Hey, Marek. Get faster updates on g.com.
Tell me something.
Why do you want to become a mage?”
“What, after the haircut nonsense we’re having a fireside talk between men?” Marek had already finished the salve and tucked himself beneath his warm cloak.
“Just curious.
You don’t have to answer.”
“Wanting power is natural.
Mages are the strongest.”
Lambert said nothing for a while.
“What about you?” Marek asked.
“Why do you hate mages?”
The witcher was quiet for several seconds.
“Because mages are evil,” he said at last.
“Evil?”
“People like to say witchers lose their human feelings because of mutations.
Truth is, some mages are the ones with no feeling at all.
You know about the Curse of the Black Sun?”
“I read about it.
Mad Eltibald’s prophecy.
The blood of sixty girls born during an eclipse would awaken Lilit, and her coming would destroy the world.”
Marek spoke casually.
It was hard for him to take that sort of prophecy seriously, apart from Ithlinne’s, whose shape he remembered all too well from his former life.
“Of course Marek of Bell Town doesn’t believe it,” Lambert said.
“Plenty of people did.
To stop the Curse of the Black Sun from coming true, some mages preached that girls born during an eclipse should be killed at once.
Others hunted those girls down, killed them, and cut them open afterward.
Some were vivisected.
All to study mutations no one had ever proved existed.”
By the end, his voice had gone cold with anger.
“You saw that yourself?”
“The preaching had support all over the North for a while.
People believed it and acted on it.
You still find poison from that idea in villages even now.
The dissections, Geralt told me about.
Years ago, in Blaviken, a mage being hunted by his enemies tried to hire Geralt’s help.
While making his case, he mentioned that he had once attended one of those dissections.”
“Every group has its monsters,” Marek said quietly.
Lambert’s voice turned cold.
“They stand above everyone and act like they’re always right.
Their prophecies wreck lives, but no one answers for the damage.
Do you know the sort of contracts witchers sometimes get?
Some people think we’re assassins.
They say the two swords on our backs mean silver for monsters and steel for men.”
“Wait.
Isn’t that what it means?”
Even now, Marek sometimes caught himself humming the old line from Velen: steel for humans.
“Fuck, no.
Some monsters fall to silver.
Others need steel.
“Point is, more than once, fools who believed in the Black Sun tried to hire me to deal with the so-called source of a curse.
Those poor girls were locked in towers, beaten, starved, and broken beyond recognition, all because they were born at the wrong hour.”
His voice dropped lower.
“And what did you do with those contracts?” Marek asked.
Silence settled between them.
“I did nothing.
“It wasn’t my work.
“Killing them wasn’t my work.
Saving them wasn’t either.”
Marek looked up at the sky.
To the left of the Winter Maiden was the constellation of the winged horse.
Whatever world people lived in, horses had always been close to them, and so they made room for horses in the heavens.
“There are good mages too,” he said softly.
“Sure.
Like Yennefer…
no.
Even dead, I’m not praising her.
“Like Merigold, then.
Triss at least truly helped us look after Ciri.
She treated Geralt well, and she could speak to us while looking us in the eye.
“Most mages are more like Yennefer.
Always looking down their noses at everyone, convinced the world is full of idiots and they’re the only ones clever enough to give orders.
Only a fool like Geralt would let her twist him in circles.”
“Triss is a good woman,” Marek said, with the ease of someone who almost sounded as if he knew her.
That made Lambert glance over.
“You know Merigold?”
“Triss Merigold, the Fourteenth of the Hill.
You mentioned she was there when Geralt died, so I asked Vesemir about her afterward.”
That much was true.
Asking questions he already knew the answers to was a useful habit.
“She’s decent in most ways,” Lambert said.
“Her love of politics is what annoys me.
Schemes, plots, filth.
Mages are all like that.
They think the world stops turning without them.”
“Then I won’t become that kind of arrogant mage.
If I become one at all.”
“If you dare turn into that, I’ll kick your ass.”
“Don’t worry.
The chance isn’t high anyway.
The medallion already told us I don’t have a drop of magic in me.”
“Try again?”
Lambert pulled the wolf-head medallion from his neck and tossed it onto Marek.
It lay there calm as stone.
Not the slightest tremor.
Marek chuckled and tossed it back.
“All right.
I really am going to sleep.”
Lambert rubbed his nose.
“Don’t despair.
A man needs a dream.
Maybe your talent is so strong you just can’t sense it.
Happens in stories all the time.”
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Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.