TEMERIA -
The inn was called The Broken Wheel, and it looked exactly like its name a sagging two-story building at the edge of a village whose name Dandelion had already forgotten, half a day's ride east of Vizima on the road that led eventually to the Pontar. The sign outside hung crooked. The door didn't close properly. The fire smoked more than it burned.
They'd taken a table in the corner, backs to the wall, out of long habit. The ale was thin and warm. The bread was stale. Neither of them had complained, which was itself a bad sign, Dandelion always complained about something.
Two days they'd been in this village. Two days of riding east from the Redanian border, through farmland that had gone wrong, fields half-harvested and abandoned. A mill with no miller. A bridge with no toll-keeper and fresh-cut timbers stacked beside it that nobody had bothered to raise.
Foltest had been dead for weeks, and Temeria was coming apart at the seams.
Zoltan drank, set the tankard down, and stared at the wall over Dandelion's shoulder. "You see the one by the door?"
"I saw him."
"That's the third one. Same poster."
The poster was nailed to the doorframe at eye height, a cheap woodcut with rough ink and a worse likeness, a man with two swords crossed on his back. Below it, in block letters someone had carved in haste:
'WANTED FOR REGICIDE - WITCHER, BLACK HAIR, YELLOW EYES, REWARD 3,000 CROWNS.'
Dandelion glanced at it, then away. "It doesn't even look like him, the nose is wrong. The jaw's completely wrong, if I saw that man in the street I wouldn't cross to avoid him."
"That's not the point, you peacock. The point is they put a wolf medallion on the woodcut. They know what school."
"I can see the medallion, Zoltan."
"Then you can see what it means for every witcher who walks into a Temerian town this winter with a wolf medallion." Zoltan's voice stayed low, but something underneath it had gone hard. "Bastards don't even know what really happened. They've got no idea who killed those kings with their own hands, they've got no idea the boy was nowhere to be found when that happened, and for them to to point a finger at Seb of all people. The one man in who'd have died before he let Foltest be hurt."
Dandelion took a slow pull of his ale and set it down carefully, the way he did when he was trying not to let his hands shake. "You were in the city when it happened," he said. "I was in the city when it happened. We were drinking in a tavern two streets from the castle and we didn't know a thing until a man came through the door screaming." He turned the tankard a quarter-turn on the table. "I keep thinking about it. If we'd been inside.. if we'd been with him.."
"Then we'd be two more bodies on the tile you dimwit, and no help to him at all." Zoltan shook his head. "You've got to stop carrying that. I'm telling you as a friend. You've got the shoulders for it, but you'll break under it eventually."
"Carrying it isn't the same as it being mine." Dandelion leaned back, arms crossing. "What do we actually know? He was in Rivia. Then the portals opened, then the frost, then the kings were dead, and then he was gone. No body and without a word. And every witcher in the North is now walking around with a price on his head because a sorceress framed him."
"A sorceress and her whole Lodge of cunts."
"Philippa specifically."
"I know it's Philippa. I've known it since he told us about the damn plan with mask." Zoltan dragged a hand down his beard. "The thing that worries me, Dandelion, is that we've been asking about him for weeks now and we have exactly nothing. Not a rumor. Not a sighting. Not a farmer who saw a man with two swords pass through." He let that sit. "That's either very good or very bad, and I hate that I can't tell which."
Dandelion was quiet for a moment. Then, more slowly: "I think we should go to Kaer Morhen."
Zoltan's head came up.
"Think about it," Dandelion went on, before the dwarf could object. "It's winter. That's when the wolves come home, all of them. Geralt will be there. Vesemir, Eskel, Lambert. If anyone in the world has heard from Seb, or knows where he'd go, or can put out word through the right channels, it's them."
"I don't think I can face Geralt..." Zoltan's voice had dropped a notch. "We don't know where the boy is, you dimwit. We show up at that gate and tell Geralt of Rivia we lost Seb on the road, and what exactly do we say after that? 'Sorry, wolf, we turned our backs for one evening'?"
"He's a grown man. He's not lost, he's just somewhere. There's a difference." Dandelion reached over and tapped the poster on the wall beside them. "And he can take care of himself. We've both seen him do it. We saw him take on a Leshen, I mean come on..."
"I know damn it." Zoltan's palm came flat down on the table. A few heads turned. He ignored them and lowered his voice. "I know. That's the thing. That's the problem, I know exactly what he can do, and it still doesn't sit right, walking into that keep without him."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then Dandelion said, quietly, "Fine. We still need to go."
Zoltan let out a long breath through his nose. "Aye. We should."
Dandelion lifted his ale, glanced at the poster again, and drank.
"You know," he said, wiping his mouth, "I'm a little surprised we're not wanted as well. We were with him in Rivia. We've been seen with him. If whoever drew up this woodcut had any sense at all, our names would be on a list somewhere too."
Zoltan snorted. "You are hardly important bard outside of females who swoon all over you. And what could they even charge you with? What are you going to do with that instrument of yours? sing people to death?"
"Music is a strong weapon, you know."
"Is it."
"It absolutely is. I have ended feuds with a single verse. I have stopped a knife fight in Kaedwen with three chords and a rhyme about a farmer's daughter. I have on one memorable occasion, talked a Nilfgaardian deserter out of his own boots with nothing but a lute and eye contact."
Zoltan shook his head, but the corner of his mouth had twitched. He finished his ale, set the tankard down with a heavy clack, and stood.
"Right. Kaer Morhen." He pulled his coat off the back of the chair and shrugged it on. "Long ride, a damn cold ride. And we're going to have to explain ourselves to four or five witchers who will absolutely not be happy to see us, without the one person who was supposed to be doing the explaining."
"There's an argument to be made that they'll be relieved."
"There's an argument to be made that you're an optimist and it'll get us both killed one day."
They paid the innkeeper a thin, jumpy woman who took the coin without meeting their eyes and kept glancing at the poster on the way out, and stepped into the grey afternoon. Their horses were where they'd left them, heads down against the cold. The road west toward the mountains ran straight out of the village and vanished into low cloud, and there was nobody else on it.
Dandelion tightened his cloak and swung up. "I'll take the lead. I know the northern route better."
"You know a tavern on the northern route better."
"That's the same thing, and you know it."
.
.
.
.
KAER MORHEN -
The room was still dim when Seb woke, the first grey light of morning barely reaching the window, the fire long dead in the hearth, the furs cold where Ciri had already slipped out from under them. He lay there a moment, listening. Down the corridor, somewhere far off, boots on stone. The keep stirring. Kaer Morhen waking up like it always did, slow and grudging, the way old things wake.
Then he heard her, and he sat up.
Ciri was standing at the foot of the bed with her back to him, already dressed for the road, dark wool trousers, a heavy tunic under a fitted leather jerkin, gloves tucked through her belt. Her hair was tied back off her face, practical, no loose strands to catch on a branch or blow into her eyes mid-swing. She'd laid her things out on the chest at the end of the bed the way she always did before a job: sword belt, dagger, small pouch of coin, whetstone, flint, a length of oiled cloth for the blade.
She was checking the edge of her sword with her thumbnail, the way Vesemir had taught them both before either of them had been tall enough to reach the top shelf.
Seb swung his legs off the mattress and reached for his own clothes. "You're up early."
"You're up late," she said without turning around.
"I was awake before you left. I just didn't want to give you the satisfaction of being the first one dressed."
That earned him a short huff of breath, which was as close as she got to a laugh before sunrise.
He pulled on his trousers, laced his boots, and stood to work his arms through the sleeves of his tunic. She'd already laid his kit out for him too she'd done it without mentioning it, the way she did everything she wanted to be helpful about, and he noticed, and said nothing about that either. His jerkin came on stiff with the cold. His belt, then the two scabbards, silver and steel, settled onto his back in the exact place they always sat. He rolled his shoulders once, twice, feeling the weight settle in, then reached for the whetstone on the chest and ran it twice along the steel out of habit. It didn't need it. He did it anyway.
Ciri finished with her blade, slid it home, and turned around.
For a second neither of them said anything. The room looked smaller in the grey light than it did at night. It was a small room. It had never been anything else. It had been his before it was Yennefer's before it was his again, four walls and a window and a fireplace that smoked if the wind came in from the wrong direction, and now that they were about to walk out of it for the winter, at least, for however long this took, it looked a little more like something worth missing than it had any right to.
Ciri picked up her gloves and started pulling them on.
"Are you ready?" she said.
Seb pulled his own gloves from his belt and worked them on one at a time. "Are you?"
She didn't answer right away. She flexed her fingers inside the leather, checked the grip, then looked up at him.
"I have to be," she said.
It wasn't an evasion. He knew the difference. It was the plain truth, laid out flat between them, she wasn't ready in the way you'd want to be ready. She was going because the alternative was staying, and staying was the one thing she'd promised herself she was done doing.
Seb nodded slowly.
"Then so am I," he said.
She looked at him for a beat longer than the answer needed. Then she grabbed her cloak off the hook, threw it around her shoulders, and headed for the door.
"Come on," she said, over her shoulder. "Breakfast, then the courtyard. If we dawdle too long, Lambert will try to come with us."
"Would he?"
"He'd threaten to." She pulled the door open. "And then he'd spend the whole ride complaining, and I'd end up leaving him in a ditch somewhere between here and Ard Carraigh. It'd be embarrassing for everyone."
Seb smiled as he picked up his pack and followed her out.
/-\
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