New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤
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Bras of Ban Ard had two deep lines bracketing his mouth, a red wide-brimmed hat with a feather, and a tight embroidered doublet that made him look like a respectable man.
Anyone who knew him, however, knew he was only the owner of Rafard’s Decoctions, a magical goods shop whose promise was “cheap, decent quality.” Business was ordinary.
It kept him fed, but not much more.
Still, even if life had not treated him grandly, he had once had dreams.
He had once been brilliant and full of himself.
He was, after all, a graduate of Ban Ard Academy.
Why would a mage trained at Ban Ard end up running a small shop?
It was the sort of question with a simple answer: some academy men ended up hungry in alleys, while some dropouts became richer than princes.
Recently, though, Bras had begun to feel lucky.
Ten days earlier, a boy had come to him with a recommendation letter from the rector of the academy.
He wanted to place goods on consignment and buy a few materials in return.
The letter was genuine, of course.
No one in Ban Ard dared joke about that.
What surprised Bras was how capable this young alchemist turned out to be.
His potions not only met the standard of “cheap and decent,” but came in quantity.
Every day he brought at least a dozen virility tonics and twenty-four hangover cures.
For an alchemist, quality and volume rarely came together.
Yet the boy’s products were remarkably consistent.
He was practically a specialist in virility tonics and hangover cures.
In a city of more than thirty thousand residents, with thousands more passing through, neither product was likely to sit unsold.
Demand outran supply.
The consignment business for those two main products alone had given Rafard’s Decoctions both profit and reputation.
Better still, the boy seemed fascinated by odd magical goods and often took strange items from the shop as part of his payment.
Bras found that even more satisfying.
***
Knowing Bras helped put Marek’s failure in perspective.
That afternoon in Dorregaray’s tower, after the awkward end of his dream, the alchemy apprentice and the witcher left the academy grounds in a hurry.
Before leaving, however, Marek asked the archmage for one more thing: a recommendation letter to the local alchemists’ guild.
With that letter, he could buy special materials from the guild, including venom extracts, anesthetics, Zerrikanian powder, and other restricted supplies.
More importantly, it allowed him to sell alchemical potions openly in the city.
Hangover cures and virility tonics were everyday consumables.
Marek had made them with Impossible Alchemy when he was ten.
The day those medicines first went on sale in Bell Town, the married couples over forty had collectively granted him the title of master.
In a peaceful village like that, apart from crop treatments and nutritional tonics, there were only so many things worth selling.
Those two new products alone had outsold his grandmother’s previous year within two months.
“I refuse to make such vulgar medicine,” his grandmother had said.
So Marek had become the household’s main earner.
In short, he was very experienced at making money from those two formulas.
Even though the herbs of this world were entirely different from the ones he had known before, it barely mattered.
It reached them directly.
He only had to choose herbs with useful effects at an apothecary.
Harmful properties, side effects, and the ordinary logic of formulas could all be ignored.
In an hour, he could boil an entire pot while reading a book and stirring with one hand.
The only real concerns were keeping the effect from becoming too strong and remembering to leave in some harmless impurities.
There was a reason he chose Rafard’s Decoctions as his agent.
Bras had graduated from the academy, and his present circumstances proved that entering Ban Ard did not guarantee strength.
Marek would never admit the uglier corner of his own heart, but the fact did bring a faint comfort.
City life suited him beautifully.
His daily route became a neat circuit: private inn room, market, Rafard’s Decoctions, library.
That evening, Lambert grew restless.
Ten days had passed since they left Dorregaray’s tower.
Marek had not mentioned his dream again.
Instead, with the recommendation letter, he had thrown himself fully into the apothecary trade and even rented a single room separate from Lambert’s.
Their sword practice still happened every morning and night, without fail.
Beyond that, however, the boy’s life was so regular it almost looked as if he meant to grow old there.
A city guarded by mages also had little need for witchers.
If this continued, Lambert felt he might rust.
So he kicked open Marek’s room door.
“Tell me what you’re planning, brat.
What now?
You going to settle down here selling virility tonics forever?”
The scene inside looked normal at first.
Marek was boiling something.
Then Lambert came closer and saw ducats simmering in the pot.
The witcher stared.
“Why are you boiling money?”
“It got dirty,” Marek said calmly.
“I’m disinfecting it.”
Lambert’s mouth twisted with disgust.
“Careless.”
He dragged over a chair and sat down.
Marek put the pot away at his own pace, pulled over another chair, and lifted his milk without hurry.
“Now,” Lambert said, returning to the question that had been interrupted.
“Plans.”
“I’m going to become a witcher.”
The white smear of milk on his upper lip did nothing to soften the certainty in his voice.
Lambert went rigid.
For a moment, he nearly jumped out of the chair.
Because they got along, and because Marek had talent, part of him did want the boy to become a witcher.
Another part wanted him nowhere near the Trial of the Grasses.
Every child who had taken the Trial with Lambert had died on the table.
He had been the only success.
Now Lambert really did want to jump up.
Possibly to hit him.
“Do you enjoy dramatic pauses?”
“Not until I make the Trial of the Grasses safer.
A seventy-percent death rate is out of the question.”
He wiped the milk from his mouth, expression serious.
Lambert rubbed the stubble on his chin and digested the new information.
If the boy could truly reduce the mortality rate, that did change things.
“Then what are you doing now?
I don’t understand library records, fine.
But I’m not ignorant about alchemy.
How much time do you burn every day just making potions to sell?
“And what about all the magical junk you keep bringing back?
Music boxes, glowing tubes, little dark-magic skull dolls, weird charms against thieves, fleas, indigestion, diarrhea.
What good are they?
“And why in hell do you spend hours in the market every day?”
Marek listened to the entire challenge, then gave Lambert a look of royal contempt.
“You don’t understand.
I go to the market to gather intelligence.
If you ignore the world, the world abandons you.
A market can tell you more than weeks spent brooding alone.
“For example, did you know mages are slowly losing the authority they once had?”
Lambert shook his head.
“The Thanedd coup a year and a half ago proved that some mages had secretly served Nilfgaard.
The damage did more than shatter the Brotherhood of Sorcerers.
It also destroyed the trust the Northern kings had placed in mages.
“Half a year ago, during the Second War for Upper Aedirn, King Henselt had his longtime advisor, the arrogant Sabrina Glevissig, burned alive on a wheel in the middle of the battlefield.”
Lambert narrowed one eye.
“Eskel mentioned that name.
Geralt had her once.”
“Funny how that’s the sort of thing you remember.
“Anyway, Sabrina’s temper decided her execution.
Not whether it would happen, only when.
“Did you know that while serving as royal advisor, she once dared slap a table and tell King Henselt to shut up until she had finished speaking?
Courageous, yes.
Also stupid.”
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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.