Chapter Text

Tales of Corvo Bianco

A special chapter — short stories from the two years at Corvo Bianco, before "The Visit."

First Tale — The Terror of the Witches

I. The Crones

In White Orchard, the mothers had stopped letting the children play after sundown.

Then they had stopped letting them play in the late afternoon. Then at the edge of the woods, even in daylight. Then they had stopped letting them leave the house alone. And even so, in six weeks, five had vanished.

An eight-year-old girl who went to fetch water from the well. Two brothers who slept in the hayloft. A boy who went after a dog. A baby. A babe in arms, taken from the cradle with the window latched, with the mother asleep right beside it.

No footprints. No blood. Nothing. Only a smell, in the morning, in the places the children had disappeared from. A swamp smell. Of stagnant water and rotting leaves and something sweet underneath, like fruit gone past ripe.

And a song.

Three women of the village swore they had heard it. Very faint, in the middle of the night, coming from the woods. A lullaby. Sung by three old voices, one over the other.

At the tavern, the men had given them a name. The Crones. Three bog witches who lived somewhere deep in the marsh behind the orchard, and who in the bad winters came out looking for something to eat. The grandparents used to tell of them. The great-grandparents too.

No one had believed it. Until the baby.

The village elder had sent for a witcher.

He had gathered three harvests' worth of money. He had sent his son on horseback to Velen, to Oxenfurt, to wherever it took, with the purse and a letter.

And the son had come back with two.

One was a real witcher. You could tell. White hair, cat's eyes, two swords on his back, the face of someone who had seen all of this before. Geralt of Rivia, he said. He took the contract, accepted only half the money, and told the elder to keep the other half to buy milk for the children he still had.

The other, nobody knew what he was.

A man with a strange face, with narrow eyes, in red and gold armor like nothing anyone in White Orchard had ever seen. Thin overlapping plates, laced together with silk cord. A helmet with a kind of low horn. A curved sword at his waist. And, hanging from his neck, a black mask. Smooth. Mouthless.

He arrived in the village, dismounted, and bowed to the elder. Deeply. Folded in half.

The elder didn't know what to do with that. He bowed back, crooked, and nearly fell over.

“Who is he?” the elder asked the witcher, quietly, afterward.

Geralt looked at the man in red armor. Who was crouched at the edge of the well the eight-year-old had vanished from, running his fingers through the dirt, smelling it, saying nothing.

“A friend,” said Geralt.

“Is he a witcher too?”

“No.”

“Then what is he?”

Geralt thought about it.

“Hm,” he said.

The elder didn't ask again.

II. The Marsh

They found the trail on the third day.

It wasn't Geralt. It was Jin. Geralt had the cat's eyes, the medallion, the nose. But Jin had something Geralt didn't, which was having grown up on a small island, thick with brush, where the difference between a branch broken by an animal and a branch broken by a person was the difference between eating that night and not eating.

And there, at the edge of the marsh, was a broken branch.

Not by an animal. Not by a person.

Broken from the top down. At the height of a tall man. With a mark on it that wasn't a claw and wasn't a tooth. A long, thin mark, like one made by a very long, very old fingernail.

Jin showed Geralt. Geralt looked for a long time.

“There aren't three,” said Geralt.

“No?”

“Four.” He pointed at the ground. At the marks Jin hadn't seen, because Jin couldn't see in the dark. “Three walk together. One walks behind. Alone. Lighter. Younger.”

“An apprentice.”

“Or a daughter.”

Jin kept looking at the marks.

“The song,” he said. “The women of the village heard three voices.”

“The fourth doesn't sing.” Geralt stood. “The fourth listens.”

They went into the marsh at night.

Geralt in front, silver sword drawn, the medallion trembling faintly against his chest, slow, unceasing. Jin behind, without a sound. With the mask on his face now. With the katana sheathed. And with a leather pouch at his hip, heavy, that Aloy had filled in the Corvo Bianco workshop before they left.

Six clay balls, the size of an apple, with short fuses. Three of smoke. Three of something else.

These three aren't smoke, Aloy had said, setting them apart carefully. Gunpowder with silver filings. They make a noise you won't like. And anything that doesn't like silver is going to like it even less.

Jin had thanked her with a bow. Aloy had rolled her eyes.

The marsh was worse on the inside than on the outside.

Water up to the knee. Dead trees, gray, with roots rising from the water like fingers. Low fog, thick, that clung to the armor. And that smell, stronger with every step. Swamp and rotting leaves. And fruit gone past ripe.

And then, far away, in the middle of the fog, the song.

Three voices. Old. One over the other. Softly singing a lullaby Jin didn't know, in a tongue Geralt knew very well and would rather not have.

Geralt stopped.

“They know we're here,” he said, low.

“I know.”

“They're singing to us. Not to the children. To us. It's an invitation.”

Jin was quiet.

“Then I accept,” he said.

III. The Hut

The hut stood on an island of mud in the middle of the marsh.

If you could call it a hut. It was more of a heap. Branches, bones, hides, mud, all piled and stitched and stuck together, with a roof of moss and a door that was just a hole. And in front, around an iron cauldron the size of a bathtub, bubbling over a green fire, three women.

They weren't women.

They had been. A long time ago. Now they were something else. Too tall, too thin, with arms too long, reaching down to their knees, ending in fingers that ended in nails like knives. Gray-green skin, wrinkled, hanging off the bones like wet clothes. Long hair, white, filthy, full of leaves. And the faces...

Jin preferred not to look at the faces too long.

The three were stirring the cauldron. Singing. And behind them, in the mud, tied with vine rope to a dead tree, five children.

Alive.

Dirty. Cold. Eyes enormous. The eight-year-old girl holding the baby in her lap, wrapped in a cloth, both her hands tied in front of her. The two brothers leaning against each other. The dog boy crying without a sound.

Alive.

Jin let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

The song stopped.

All three turned their heads at once. In the same direction. Toward the fog. Toward where Geralt and Jin stood.

“Witcher,” said the one in the middle. In a voice that sounded like three voices at once. “We smelled your silver from the edge of the marsh.”

Geralt stepped out of the fog. Sword low.

“Let the children go,” he said.

The three laughed. A three-throated laugh, wet, that made the children shrink.

“He wants the children,” said the one on the left.

“Everyone wants the children,” said the one on the right.

“But we took them first,” said the one in the middle. And she tilted her head. “Did you come alone, witcher? How brave. How stupid.”

“No,” said Geralt.

And he stepped aside.

Jin came out of the fog.

Slowly. Walking. Through the shallow water, without a sound, the red armor gleaming in the green firelight and the black mask on his face, smooth, mouthless, with two slits for eyes.

He stopped ten paces from the three.

And bowed.

“My name is Jin Sakai,” he said. “Of clan Sakai. I have come for these children.”

The three stared at him.

“Release the children,” Jin went on. “And leave this marsh. Go far away. Somewhere no village will ever hear your song again. If you do that, I will not follow.”

He straightened his back.

“If you don't, take whatever you have, and come. I will wait.”

The silence in the marsh lasted one full second.

And then the three laughed again. Louder. Much louder. Doubled over, their knife-hands on their knees, cackling.

“He'll wait!” shrieked the one on the left.

“The little red man will wait!” shrieked the one on the right.

And the one in the middle stopped laughing. Suddenly. And looked at Jin with yellow eyes.

“We've eaten men like you for breakfast,” she said. “For three hundred years.”

“I imagine,” said Jin.

And the three came.

IV. The Ghost Stance

They came fast. Very fast. Faster than things that size should move, gliding over the water without sinking, arms spread wide, nails out front.

Jin didn't draw his sword.

He drew a clay ball from the pouch. One of the ones that weren't smoke. Struck the fuse against the plate on his arm. And threw. Low across the water. Right between the three.

The blast was enormous.

A ball of white fire, full of silver sparks, that threw up a column of water and mud and fog as high as the crowns of the dead trees. The three were hurled backward. Screaming. Their gray skin smoking where the silver had struck, sizzling like meat on coals.

Jin threw the second.

And the third.

And when the mud settled, the three were on their knees in the water, blind, deaf, ears bleeding and skin split in a hundred places, groping for him with their hands in the air, like someone feeling for a light switch in the dark.

Jin wasn't there anymore.

He had tried to teach Geralt this once, one night on the porch. He had tried. He didn't know how to explain it properly.

In his land, there was a way of fighting the samurai didn't teach. That no sword master taught. That wasn't on any scroll. He had learned it on his own, in a war that couldn't be won any other way, with the blood of a great many people on his arms.

It wasn't a stance of the body. It was a stance of something else.

It was the moment the enemy understood they were going to die.

Jin had discovered, on the island, that there was an instant, in a fight, after the first ones fell, when the others stopped fighting like warriors and started fighting like prey. An instant when the fear got in. And that if he stepped inside that instant, if he wore that fear the way he wore the mask, the enemies who remained stopped being enemies.

They became people waiting their turn.

The Mongols had given it a name. Not the stance. Him.

Ghost.

The first witch felt him coming.

She didn't see him. She felt him. A change in the air, behind her. A chill. She turned, nails raised, mouth open to scream.

And the katana left its sheath.

Once.

There was no sound of cutting. No scream. Only a silver line in the air, from one side to the other, too fast to see, and the sound of the blade going back into its sheath. Clack.

The witch stayed standing one more second.

Mouth open. Nails raised.

And came apart.

She didn't fall. She came apart. In pieces. Along the place the line had passed, and along two more places no one had seen the line pass. She fell into the marsh water in three parts, and the water darkened around her, and the song she had been singing for three hundred years stopped halfway down her throat forever.

The other two heard it.

Heard the water. The weight falling. The silence where their sister's voice should have been.

And they turned.

And saw him.

Standing in the middle of the fog, two paces from what was left of their sister. Still. Hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword. Black mask turned toward them. Not breathing hard. Not moving. As if he had never left that spot.

The witch on the right screamed.

Not from fear. Not yet. From rage. And she came. Both knife-hands open, mouth full of brown teeth, flying over the water.

Jin let her come.

Let her come so close her nails touched his breastplate. That she smelled the lacquer of his armor. That she saw, through the slits in the mask, his eyes.

His eyes were calm.

And the katana rose.

From below, upward. A single line. From the groin to the crown of the head.

The witch hung in the air in front of him, arms spread.

And her two halves separated. Slowly. One to each side. Like a double door swinging open. And they fell into the water, one on either side of Jin, with a wet sound, while he stood still in the middle, between them, sword raised, without a drop on him.

Three hundred years.

Split in half like a log.

And then came the fear.

The third witch, the one in the middle, the one with the voice of three voices, the one who ate men for breakfast, stood frozen in the middle of the marsh.

And Geralt, leaning against a dead tree twenty paces away, sword low, watching, saw it happen. Saw it on her face. The same thing he had seen on a thousand faces of a thousand monsters in a hundred years on the road, almost always looking at him. The thing that comes when the predator understands it is no longer the predator.

She took a step back.

Jin took a step forward.

Slowly. Unhurried. Sword low now, the tip nearly touching the water, dripping.

She took another step back.

He took another forward.

“No,” she said. And her voice had lost its three voices. It was just one. Small. Old. A woman's. “No. Wait. Wait. We'll let them go. We'll let the children go. We'll leave. You said. You said if we left—”

“I said,” Jin agreed. “Before.”

She tried to run.

She turned her back and tried to run across the water. And her feet, which had glided over the marsh her whole life without sinking, sank. Into the mud. Up to the ankle. She pulled. They didn't come free. She pulled again. Stumbled. Fell on all fours in the water, thrashing, screaming, digging her nails into the mud to drag herself away, crying, really crying, a three-hundred-year-old thing crying in the mud like a child.

Jin came up behind her.

He said nothing.

The katana came down once.

And the crying stopped.

The fourth had never sung.

She had stayed inside the hut. Listening. Watching through a gap between the bones and branches. A thing smaller than the others. Younger. With hair still half dark. Who had seen the first one come apart, and the second open like a door, and the third cry in the mud.

And who didn't wait for anything else.

She slipped out the back of the hut, through a hole in the floor, slithering through the mud like a snake. And ran. Across the back of the island. Through the deep water. Through the fog. Into the trees. Without looking back. Fleeing the man in red with the mouthless mask with everything her legs had.

And ran face-first into a silver sword.

Geralt hadn't left the tree. He didn't need to. He had seen the marks on the ground, three days earlier. One that walked behind. Alone. Lighter. And he knew, because a hundred years on the road teaches you these things, that the one who walks behind is always the one who runs first, and always runs out the back.

The fourth witch ran straight onto the blade.

Geralt just held it.

V. The Ghost

The children came back to White Orchard early in the morning.

On Geralt's back, the two smallest. In Jin's arms, the baby, wrapped in the cloth, asleep. The other three walking alongside, holding onto the witcher's cloak, wide-eyed, not saying a word the whole road.

The entire village was waiting at the entrance. No one had slept.

And when the mothers saw the children appear around the bend in the road, the sound they made was one Jin would remember for the rest of his life. It wasn't a scream. It was something deeper. Something that came up out of the ground.

They ran. All of them. At once.

The baby's mother took him from Jin's arms without even looking at Jin. Pressed him to her chest. Fell to her knees in the road with him.

Jin took a step back.

And another.

And went to the side of the road, by the orchard fence, where no one was looking.

It was the eight-year-old girl who told it.

At the tavern, later, with a bowl of soup in front of her, wrapped in a blanket, with the whole village around her listening. Her mother holding her hand. The elder beside her.

“It was the ghost,” she said.

Her mother frowned.

“What ghost, sweetheart?”

“The ghost.” The girl stirred her soup. “He came out of the fog. He had a black face, with no mouth. He talked to them first. Polite. He said if they went away he wouldn't follow. And they laughed.” She swallowed. “And then he disappeared. And the witches started falling. One. Then the other. He'd appear and disappear. Nobody saw him walk. He just appeared.”

The dog boy, on the other side of the table, nodded hard.

“The last one cried,” he said. “The witch. She cried like a little baby.”

The girl's mother looked at the other mothers.

No one believed it. You could see it on their faces. A frightened child, six weeks in the marsh, making things up. A black-faced ghost. A witch crying. It was the witcher who had done it. Of course it was the witcher. Witchers killed monsters.

But the girl's mother squeezed her daughter's hand.

“Then I thank the ghost,” she said. Softly. “Whoever he is.”

And the other mothers said it with her.

And the elder too.

And the whole tavern.

Outside, leaning on the orchard fence, Jin heard it through the open window.

He had taken off the mask. It hung from his neck again. He was looking at the orchard, at the old apple trees, white with blossom, that gave the village its name.

Geralt came up beside him. Leaned on the same fence. With a mug of beer in each hand. He gave one to Jin.

Jin took it. Didn't drink.

They were silent a while.

“That was impressive,” Geralt said, at last.

Jin didn't answer.

“A hundred years.” Geralt took a sip. “I've seen a lot of swordsmen. I've seen masters from Toussaint, knights of Nilfgaard, elves from before the Conjunction. Never seen that.” He kept looking straight ahead. “That stance. She was afraid of you before you even got there.”

Jin kept looking at the apple trees.

“It was the Ghost stance,” he said.

“Hm.”

“In my land, a samurai fights face to face. With his face shown. He announces his name. He waits for the enemy. He kills with honor, or dies with it.” Jin turned the mug in his hand. “That has no honor at all, Geralt. It's the opposite. It's the stance I learned when honor was no longer enough to save anyone.”

He looked at his own hands.

“It doesn't exist to win. It exists to remind. To remind the enemy of what he did when he thought no one could pay him back. To put into his chest the same fear he put into the chests of others. To show him that he is small. That he is powerless. That he is exactly what his victims were.”

Geralt was silent.

“I don't like it,” said Jin. “I never have. But there were five children tied to a tree.”

He drank, finally. Just one sip.

“For them, I wear it.”

Through the tavern window, you could still hear it. The mothers retelling the story they didn't believe. The children correcting them. He didn't walk, Mom, he appeared.

And someone, one of the old women, asking whether the ghost would come back. Whether he protected only White Orchard, or other villages too.

Geralt looked at Jin.

Jin said nothing.

He just pushed off the fence. And went to get his horse.

On the road out of the village, he passed by the eight-year-old girl's house. She was at the window. She saw him pass. Saw the black mask hanging from his neck.

And she didn't say anything to anyone.

She just waved.

Second Tale — The Paid Drink  ( Gaunter O'Dimm)

I. The Tavern

V arrived in White Orchard with the rain.

She had nothing to do there. She was just passing through. Coming back from a job in Velen, escorting a salt merchant to Oxenfurt, boring, long, without a single bandit along the way, which had been a disappointment. Pinot was tired. She was tired. The rain had started on the road and wouldn't stop, thin, cold, the kind that gets in through your collar.

And there was a tavern at the edge of the village. With smoke coming out of the chimney.

She tied Pinot to the fence, under the roof of the shed. Gave her an apple. Promised it would be quick.

And went in.

It was a village tavern. Just like every village tavern she had seen in that world. Low ceiling, dark beams, packed-earth floor covered in straw. A fire lit at the back. Four tables, three empty. Two farmhands at the fourth, playing dice and complaining about the rain. A smell of sour beer and onion soup.

And a woman behind the counter. Heavy-set, in an apron, with red arms, drying a mug with a rag that probably made the mug dirtier.

V went to the counter. Shook the rain out of her hair. Sat on the stool.

“A beer,” she said. “The least bad one you've got.”

The tavern keeper looked at her.

And didn't pick up a mug.

“It's already paid for, ma'am.”

V raised her eyes.

“Say again?”

“The beer. It's already paid for.” The tavern keeper filled the mug from the barrel tap and pushed it toward her. “And the next one too. And the soup, if you want it. Somebody paid for everything. An hour ago.”

“Who paid?”

The tavern keeper opened her mouth to answer.

And stopped.

She stood there with her mouth open, the rag frozen in her hand. Her brow slowly furrowing. Like someone reaching for a word that was on the tip of her tongue and suddenly isn't anymore.

“A gentleman,” she said, at last. “A gentleman. He...” She looked at the door. Then at the corner. “He said you'd be coming. With the rain. On a dark mare. He asked me not to let you pay for anything.”

“What did he look like?”

The tavern keeper thought.

She thought hard.

“I don't remember,” she said. And she looked frightened not to remember. “Funny. I looked at him. I took the coin out of his hand. And I don't remember his face.”

She pointed with her chin toward the corner of the tavern.

“He's over there, I think.”

V turned her head.

In the corner of the tavern, near the fire, there was a table she hadn't seen when she came in.

That was impossible. She always saw. It was the first thing she did in a new place: read the room. Count the doors, the windows, the tables, the people. She had counted four tables.

There were five.

And at the fifth, sitting with his back to the wall, with a bowl of porridge in front of him and a wooden spoon in his hand, was a man.

An ordinary man. That was what bothered her most. Too ordinary. Middle-aged, maybe. Thin dark hair, slicked back. Traveler's clothes, brown, simple, a little worn at the elbows. A face that was neither handsome nor ugly, neither young nor old, that V looked at and half forgot in the same second, like a word in a foreign language.

He was eating the porridge. Slowly. Savoring it.

And when V looked at him, he raised his spoon. Like someone raising a glass for a toast.

And smiled.

V's optics did what they always did. Scanned.

Height, weight, temperature, heart rate, implants, concealed weapons. She did it without thinking, ever since Night City, with everyone.

The HUD blinked in the corner of her vision.

TARGET: —

TEMPERATURE: —

HEART RATE: —

NO DATA.

V stared at the text.

Tried again.

NO DATA.

It wasn't an error. It wasn't interference. She knew both of those. This was something else. It was her optics looking at a place where there was a man and finding no man at all.

She picked up the paid-for beer.

And went over to his table.

II. The Man with the Wooden Spoon

“Sit, sit,” said the man, before she got there. Pointing at the chair across from him with the spoon. “Please. I've wanted to meet you for a long time.”

V didn't sit.

She stood beside the table. Mug in one hand. The other loose, near her hip.

“You paid for my beer.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the least I could do.” He scraped the bottom of the bowl with the spoon. “You came from very far away, Valerie. From farther than anyone in this tavern, this village, this kingdom. A beer is little. But it's what there was.”

V went very still.

No one in that world called her Valerie. No one. Not Ciri. Not Geralt. She had never said that name out loud since she fell into the alley.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Ah.” The man smiled again. A wide, friendly smile, a market peddler's smile. “I have many names. Here they call me one thing. Far away they call me another. Once, a very old woman called me Master Mirror, and I thought it was lovely, and I kept that one for a while.”

He pointed at the chair again.

“Sit, Valerie. I don't bite. Not today.”

V looked at him one second more.

And sat.

Not because he asked. Because her legs did it on their own. And she only noticed after she was already sitting.

That shouldn't have been possible either.

“Do you like it here?” he asked.

“Here where?”

“This world.” He twirled the spoon between his fingers. “This place of swords and horses and rain. Without the lights. Without the noise. Without the net.”

V didn't answer.

“I think you do,” he said, as if she had answered. “I think you like it more than you admit. You sleep better here. You eat better. You learned to ride.” He tilted his head toward the window, toward the fence, toward the dark mare under the shed. “She likes you. Pinot. Animals know things.”

“How do you know my mare's name?”

“I know the names of a lot of things.”

“That's not an answer.”

“No.” He agreed, pleased. “It isn't.”

“What do you want?” V asked.

The man seemed to find the question very funny.

“Everyone asks me that,” he said. “Everyone. Always. What do you want, what do you want in return, what's the price.” He shook his head. “I do like a good deal, I won't lie. Very much. It's my favorite thing in the world. In all the worlds.”

He leaned forward.

“But with you there's no deal, Valerie.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's nothing I could offer you,” he said, in a soft voice, almost tender, “that you won't give away for free.”

V didn't understand.

And at the same time, deep down, a part of her understood, and went cold.

“I just wanted to look,” said the man, leaning back. “That's all. I have this habit. When I know something big is going to happen, something beautiful, I like to meet the people beforehand. Look them in the face. Buy them a drink. Afterward they get too busy, you know? Afterward there's never time.”

“What big thing?”

He smiled.

“You're going to meet an old man,” he said. “A very, very old man. Who thinks he's a god. He isn't, of course. But it's been so long since anyone disagreed with him that he ended up believing it.” He twirled the spoon. “He thinks he has a thousand years' head start on everyone. Poor thing.”

“Poor thing why?”

“Because he's never met anyone like you.”

V stared at him.

“When?” she asked.

“Oh, not so soon.” He made a vague gesture with the spoon. “One turn of the sun. More or less. There's a harvest in between. There's a letter. There's a wedding that isn't a wedding yet. There's a night on a road in Toussaint that you won't like at all.”

He paused.

And for the first time, his smile dimmed. A little. Barely.

“I'm sorry about that part,” he said. “Truly. He was a good man. He bowed very beautifully.”

V stood up.

The chair fell over backward.

The two farmhands stopped their dice.

“Who?” she said. “Who was a good man? Who are you talking about?”

The man didn't answer. He picked up the empty bowl. Looked inside it, as if searching for more porridge. Found none.

“Once,” he said, as if changing the subject, “I met a man in a hat.”

V stood still.

“Not here. Far away. In a place of desert and trains and horses. He coughed. Coughed a lot. He thought he was dying, and he was.” The man smiled, remembering. “He walked into a cabin of mine, once, by mistake, looking for something else. And I painted his portrait. He didn't much like it. Nobody likes seeing their own portrait painted by me.”

He raised his eyes to her.

“When you get back home, give my regards to Mr. Morgan. Tell him the portrait has changed. That he'll like this version better.”

V felt her stomach turn.

Arthur. He was talking about Arthur. About a place that didn't exist here. About a world nobody in this world knew. About a cough only five people had ever heard.

“You're not from here,” she said.

“No one is from anywhere, Valerie.”

“Cut it out.”

“Cut what out?”

“This riddle bullshit.” V planted both hands on the table. Leaned in. The servos in her arms gave a low whir. “Talk straight. Who you are. What you know. And why you're following me.”

The man looked at her hands on the table.

Looked at her arms. At the metal under the skin.

And didn't seem the least bit worried.

“You've been searching for a network for a long time, haven't you?” he said, quietly.

V stopped breathing.

“Since the alley. Since the first day. Blinking there in the corner of your eye. Stubborn.” He smiled. “One day you'll find it.”

And he stood.

Slowly. Pushing the chair back. Setting the wooden spoon inside the empty bowl, carefully.

“Oh. And tell your tenant I said hello.” He pointed two fingers at her forehead. At the back of her neck. At the place behind her eyes. “When he wakes up. He will wake up. Tell him I adore his band.”

III. What Doesn't Stop

V didn't think.

Her body did it on its own.

The Sandevistan woke at the back of her neck, and the world went green at the edges, and stopped. The rain stopped outside the window, every drop hanging in the air like glass. The fire in the hearth stopped, the flames motionless, orange, like a painting. The two farmhands froze mid-gesture, a die suspended between hand and table. The tavern keeper froze with the rag halfway around the mug.

Everything stopped.

And V reached out to grab the man's wrist.

Three seconds. That was all she allowed herself in that time, in that world. Three seconds of Sandevistan. It was more than she needed for anything alive.

Her hand closed on air.

On air.

There was no wrist.

The chair was empty. The bowl was on the table. And the wooden spoon, inside the bowl, was spinning.

Spinning.

In the middle of stopped time. With the rain stopped and the fire stopped and the die stopped in the air. The spoon spun on its own inside the bowl, slowly, one full turn, and another, making a little sound of wood against clay that was the only sound in the world.

V stared at the spoon.

And from somewhere outside, from inside the stopped rain, came a whistle.

A melody. Cheerful. Unhurried. Like someone walking down a dirt road on a fine day, hands in his pockets.

In the middle of stopped time.

And in the corner of her vision, for the first time in more than a year, the text changed.

Just for an instant. A blink. Less than a blink.

NETWORK FOUND.

And it went back.

SEARCHING FOR NETWORK...

Time came back.

The rain fell. The fire crackled. The die struck the farmhands' table, and one of them shouted that he'd won. The tavern keeper finished drying the mug.

V was standing in the corner of the tavern. Hand outstretched in the air, closed around nothing. Panting. Heart pounding in her throat.

In front of her, a table. An empty chair. An empty bowl of porridge. A wooden spoon, still.

“You alright, ma'am?” the tavern keeper asked from the counter.

V turned to her.

“The man,” she said. “The man who was sitting here. Where did he go?”

The tavern keeper frowned.

“What man, ma'am?”

“The one who paid for my beer.”

The tavern keeper looked at the table. At the empty chair. At the bowl.

And grew confused. Truly confused. Like someone waking from a dream and no longer knowing which part was the dream.

“Somebody paid for your beer?” she asked. “I didn't... you paid, didn't you? I think you paid.”

She looked at the bowl again.

“And whose bowl is that? I didn't serve porridge today.”

V walked out of the tavern.

Into the rain. Without her jacket. She looked at the road. Both ways. At the orchard, at the old apple trees, along the fence, across the rooftops.

No one.

Not even a footprint in the mud.

She stood in the rain a long time.

It wasn't what he had said that frightened her. It was something else. Something small and cold that she would carry for a whole year, unable to explain it to anyone, without telling anyone, not Panam, not Aloy, not Arthur.

She had stopped time.

And a man had gotten up from his chair, walked to the door and left, whistling, inside stopped time.

A man.

An ordinary man, in brown clothes, who ate porridge with a wooden spoon.

Had gotten away from her.

No one got away from her. Nothing got away from her. Not with the Sandevistan running. Not the witchers. Not the vampires. Not the fastest thing she had ever seen, in this world or the other.

Until that day.

Pinot snorted under the shed.

V went to her. Untied her. Rested her forehead against her neck, a moment, against the warm coat.

“Did you see him?” she asked, softly.

Pinot didn't answer. But her ears were turned toward the road. Toward the orchard. Toward the direction from which came, ever farther, ever fainter, a whistle.

V mounted.

And never went back to White Orchard again.

A year later, on a moonlit night, in an old car parked on top of a building that didn't exist, a man with dark sunglasses and a metal arm lit a cigarette.

And suddenly, for no reason at all, felt a chill at the back of his neck.

As if someone, very far away, had just said they liked his band.

Third Tale — The Third Wheel

I. The Plan

“Three,” said Triss. “Three sorceresses. In a bookshop cellar in Oxenfurt. For two months now.”

She was sitting at the kitchen table in Corvo Bianco, with an open letter in front of her, pinned under a cup so it wouldn't fold shut. Holding the letter with the only hand she had. The left. The right ended a little below the elbow, in a clean linen wrap, folded with care, which she changed herself every morning without letting anyone help.

It had been four months since Drakenborg.

“The owner of the bookshop is a friend of mine,” Triss went on. “An old one. She hid the three when the witch hunters started searching the houses in the lower town. Only now they're searching the upper town too. House by house. She thinks they'll reach her street within a week.”

“And?” asked Ellie, from across the table, mouth full of bread.

“And I need to get the three of them out of there. And out of Oxenfurt. And out of Redania.”

“With one hand,” said Ellie.

Triss looked at her.

Ellie swallowed the bread.

“Sorry,” she said. “It slipped out.”

“No, you're right.” Triss smiled. A real smile, with no offense in it at all. “With one hand. That's why I'm asking for help.”

Arthur was leaning by the window, with a mug of coffee. He hadn't said anything yet.

“Oxenfurt's got walls,” he said, at last. “And a gate. And guards on the gate.”

“It does.”

“And the witch hunters search everything that goes out.”

“They do.”

“So three women aren't walking out through that gate.”

“No.”

Arthur spent a while looking out the window. At the courtyard. At the Corvo Bianco wine cellar, where Geralt kept the barrels.

The big barrels. Oak. The size of a person sitting down.

“Hm,” he said.

Triss followed his gaze.

And started to smile.

The plan was simple. Arthur liked simple plans.

A wine merchant from Toussaint. A couple, actually. A man and his wife, taking a cart of Corvo Bianco barrels to sell in Oxenfurt. The university students drank a lot. The masters drank even more. No one would think twice.

On the way there, the barrels full of wine. On the way back, three of them full of something else.

And the couple's daughter along with them. To look more like a family. To help with the loading. To keep watch.

“I'm not being anybody's daughter,” said Ellie.

“It's just pretend.”

“I don't look like your daughter.”

“You're a redhead,” said Triss. “I'm a redhead. No one's going to look twice.”

Ellie looked at Arthur. Dark-haired, bearded, nearly forty, six foot three.

Arthur looked at Ellie.

“Takes after her mother,” he said.

II. The Road

It took them four days to reach Oxenfurt.

The cart went slowly, heavy, with eight barrels lashed to the bed, pulled by two draft horses Geralt had lent them, grumbling. Arthur rode up on the box, with the reins. Triss sat beside him. And Ellie rode in the back, sitting on top of a barrel, legs crossed, bow in her lap, with the face of someone who had been dragged on a family trip against her will.

Which was exactly what had happened.

On the first day, Triss and Arthur talked about the road.

On the second, about horses.

On the third, Ellie stopped paying attention, because the conversation had gotten too long and too soft and too full of low laughter, and she had discovered that if she looked at the trees and counted crows she felt less queasy.

Thirty-two crows.

Thirty-three.

In front of her, on the box, Triss was talking about Drakenborg.

“The first week was the worst,” Triss was saying. “Not because of the pain. Yen took the pain away. Because of the other thing. I'd wake up in the morning and reach out with my right hand for the glass by the bed. Every morning. And there was no hand. And I'd just sit there looking at the glass.”

Arthur said nothing. But he turned his head toward her.

“I cried a lot.” She shrugged. “A sorceress shouldn't cry so much, Yen says it's inelegant. But I cried. I cried over a glass. I cried because I couldn't lace my boots. I cried because I couldn't tie up my hair.”

She touched her hair with her left hand. Red, long, tied in a slightly crooked braid over her shoulder.

“And then, one morning, I woke up and reached for the glass with my right hand. Same as always. And there was no hand. And I laughed.”

“Laughed?”

“Laughed. I don't know why. I thought it was funny. Me, Triss Merigold, member of the Council, the heroine of Sodden, sitting in a bed in Toussaint, reaching for a glass of water with a stump. Every day. Like an idiot.” She laughed again, remembering. “And after that it got easier.”

She raised her left hand. Turned her fingers. And a small flame, golden, lit at the tip of her index finger, and danced, and went out.

“I learned everything all over again. With this one. The spells, the braid, the boots. There are things I'll never be able to do again. There are spells that need both. There are things I do worse.” She looked at the road. “But I'm alive. I got out of that cell. I see the sun in the morning. I eat Ellie's goat cheese hidden behind the potatoes.”

“I heard that,” said Ellie, from the back.

Triss laughed.

“Life doesn't get smaller just because we lose a piece of it, Arthur,” she said. “It just gets different. It's on us to learn to pick up the glass with the other hand.”

Arthur was quiet a while.

Then he took the notebook out of his pocket. And the stub of pencil from behind his ear. And, holding the reins with one hand, he started drawing something on his knee.

Triss leaned over to see.

He covered it with his arm.

“Later,” he said.

“Is it me?”

“Later.”

“Arthur Morgan, are you drawing me?”

“I'm drawing the horse.”

“The horse is in front. You're looking to the side.”

“It's a horse in profile.”

Triss laughed out loud. A beautiful laugh, open, that scared two crows out of a tree.

In the back, Ellie lost count.

“Oh, for God's sake,” she muttered.

On the third night, they camped near a creek.

Arthur built the fire. Triss lit it with her finger before he finished striking the flint, and he gave her such an offended look that it made her laugh again. Ellie pitched her own tent on the other side of the cart. Far away. Very far away.

After supper, Arthur gave her the drawing.

Triss on the box, in profile, with the crooked braid over her shoulder and her left hand raised with a small flame at the tip of her finger. Laughing. Eyes shut from laughing so hard. With the stump of her right arm resting in her lap, not hidden, drawn with the same care as everything else.

Triss looked at the paper for a long time.

“You didn't hide it,” she said, softly. “The arm.”

“Why would I hide it?”

She raised her eyes to him.

She looked at him a while. With the firelight on her face. With the drawing in her hand.

And Arthur, who had never been good at reading women, who had spent his whole life reading men across a poker table, read that look very well.

And turned red.

On the other side of the cart, inside the tent, Ellie pulled the blanket over her head.

I'm the third wheel, she thought. A big squeaky third wheel. Here to roll along behind other people's romance. I should've stayed at Corvo Bianco stomping grapes.

Outside, Triss laughed softly at something Arthur said.

Ellie pressed the blanket against her ears.

III. Oxenfurt

Oxenfurt was easy.

Getting in was easy. The gate guards looked at the barrels, looked at the Corvo Bianco seal, looked at Arthur, who made the dullest, most honest face in the world, and let them through. One of them asked for a bottle. Arthur gave him two.

The bookshop was in the upper town. On a narrow stone street, with wooden balconies. The owner was a small old woman, in spectacles, who hugged Triss crying the moment she saw her, and then saw the arm, and cried harder.

In the cellar, behind a false bookcase of theology books, three women.

An old one, white-haired, who had taught alchemy at Ban Ard for forty years. A middle-aged one, stout, red-cheeked, who was a healer in a village in Kaedwen. And a girl. Sixteen, maybe. Frightened eyes. Who had discovered she was a sorceress six months earlier, when she accidentally set fire to her father's barn, and who had run away from home the next day, because her father was a witch hunter.

The girl looked at Ellie.

Ellie looked at the girl.

And for the first time on the whole trip, Ellie didn't feel like a third wheel.

Getting out was less easy.

Three empty barrels, with a false bottom Aloy had designed and the carpenter in Beauclair had built. Under the false bottom, a woman curled up, knees to chin, with a small hole in the wood to breathe through. Above the false bottom, a hand's depth of real wine. If anyone opened the lid and dipped a ladle in, wine would come out.

The old woman from Ban Ard had climbed into her barrel cursing in three languages. The healer had climbed in praying. The girl had climbed in without saying a word, holding Ellie's hand until the very last second.

“It's gonna work,” Ellie had said.

“How do you know?”

“I don't.” Ellie had shrugged. “But the big guy over there is a really good liar.”

At the outbound gate, it wasn't the guards from before.

It was witch hunters.

Four. In black, in cloaks, with the flame embroidered on their chests. And a fifth, older, gray-bearded, small-eyed, sitting on a stool beside the gate, with a list in his hand and the face of someone who distrusted even his own shadow.

The cart stopped.

The gray-bearded one stood up.

He walked slowly around the cart. Looked at the barrels. Looked at the horses. Looked at Ellie, sitting in the back, who looked back with the most bored face she could manage.

And he stopped in front of the box. Looked at Arthur.

And then at Triss.

At her arm.

“What happened to the lady's arm?” he asked.

Triss opened her mouth.

“The press,” said Arthur, before she could.

The hunter turned to him.

“The grape press,” said Arthur, in the calmest voice in the world. With that tone. The tone of a reasonable man, of a bakery bill. “We got a big one, back at the vineyard. Screw press. Old kind. She was helping with the harvest, last year, and the sleeve of her dress caught in the screw.” He shook his head slowly. “I was on the other side of the yard. I heard her scream. By the time I got there...”

He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at his own hands on the reins.

And placed his hand, very carefully, on Triss's knee.

“Worst day of my life,” he said.

Triss looked at his hand on her knee.

The witch hunter looked at it too.

In the back, on top of the barrel, Ellie looked up at the sky and silently begged any god in that world to finish her off right there.

The witch hunter was silent a while.

Then he went to the cart bed. Knocked on a barrel with his knuckle. Hollow. Knocked on another. Hollow. Knocked on the third.

The third was the girl's.

“Open this one,” he said.

Arthur climbed down from the box. Slowly. Unhurried. Took the crowbar from under the seat. Climbed onto the bed. And opened the lid of the girl's barrel.

The hunter leaned over to look inside.

Wine. Dark. Fragrant. Up to a hand's depth from the rim.

The hunter took a ladle from his belt. Dipped it into the wine.

Arthur didn't breathe.

The ladle went down. One hand's depth. Two.

On the box, Triss had her left hand in her lap, under a fold of her cloak, where no one could see. Fingers moving. Very slightly. Lips still. A drop of sweat running down her temple.

The ladle hit the false bottom.

And it made the sound of a barrel's bottom.

The hunter pulled out the ladle full of wine. Smelled it. Tasted it.

And looked surprised.

“That's good,” he said.

“It's Corvo Bianco,” said Arthur. “Last year's. Take a bottle.”

“I'll take two.”

“Take three.”

They passed through the gate.

Slowly. The cart creaking. The draft horses snorting. The four witch hunters in black watching them go, with three bottles of wine under their arms.

Only when the walls of Oxenfurt disappeared behind a bend did Triss let out her breath.

And fell back against the seat.

Hand shaking. Face white.

“You did something to the barrel,” said Arthur.

“I made the false bottom sound like a real one.” She closed her eyes. “With one hand. Under my cloak. Without moving my lips. I haven't cast a spell that hard with both hands in six years.”

Arthur looked at her.

“That was incredible,” he said.

Triss opened her eyes.

“You were the incredible one.” She laughed, still shaking. “The grape press. Where did you get that?”

“Out of my head.”

“Worst day of my life.”

“I'm a good liar.”

“You're a very good liar, Arthur Morgan.” Triss looked at him. “For a second I believed it.”

IV. Another Woman's Heart

The three sorceresses climbed out of the barrels in a clearing, half a day from Oxenfurt.

The old woman from Ban Ard came out cursing in four languages now. The healer came out thanking every god there was. And the girl came out and hugged Ellie, and Ellie went stiff as a board, and then, slowly, hugged her back.

At the edge of the clearing, a blue portal was waiting. Yennefer had left it prepared, bound to a stone ring, to be opened only once. On the other side, Toussaint. A house in Beauclair the duchess didn't know existed.

The three stepped through.

The girl stopped at the edge. Looked back. At Ellie.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Ellie. Without really knowing why.

And the girl stepped through.

Only the three of them were left in the clearing.

Ellie went to see to the horses. No one asked her to. She just went. To the other side of the cart. Far away.

And Arthur stood beside Triss, looking at the place where the portal had been.

“We did good work,” said Triss.

“We did.”

“I couldn't have done it alone.”

“You could've.” He shrugged. “Would've taken longer. But you could've.”

Triss smiled.

And she was quiet a while. And then, very slowly, without looking at him, she leaned her shoulder against his arm.

That was all. A shoulder. Leaning.

Arthur stood still.

He took a long time to speak.

So long that Triss thought he wasn't going to. So long that she began to pull away, slowly, with a small smile, like someone who had already understood.

“Triss,” he said.

She stopped.

Arthur took off his hat. Held it in his hand. Looked at it, because it was easier to look at the hat.

“You're a beautiful woman,” he said. “I want you to know that. It ain't manners. It's true. You're the most beautiful woman I ever saw laugh. And you're...” He searched for the word. “You're admirable. You lost an arm in a cell and came out of it laughing about a glass of water. I've known a lot of hard men in my life, Triss. Not one of 'em could do that.”

Triss said nothing.

“Any man'd be lucky,” Arthur went on. “Any one of 'em. Real lucky.”

He turned the hat in his hand.

“But my heart belongs to another woman.”

The wind passed through the clearing.

“She's far away. Real far. Farther than you'd imagine. She told me no, once, and she was right to. I don't know if I'll ever see her again.” He raised his eyes to Triss, finally. “But I can't forget her. I tried. I can't. And I wouldn't be fair to you pretending I could.”

Triss looked at him.

And Arthur waited for her to be sad. Or angry. Or offended. Or any of the things women did in books when a man said something like that.

She wasn't any of those.

She smiled.

A small smile, with a little sadness in it and a lot of something else.

“I know how it is,” she said.

Arthur frowned.

“Loving someone who's far away.” Triss looked south. Toward Toussaint. Toward a vineyard named after a bird, where a white-haired man was, at that moment, most likely, pruning vines beside a woman with violet eyes. “Loving someone whose heart belongs to somebody else. I know. I spent years doing it. I'm an expert.”

She laughed softly.

“And do you know what I learned? That the worst thing a man can do is pretend. Let us think there's room where there isn't.” She looked at him. “You didn't pretend.”

She rose up on her toes. And kissed him on the cheek. Quick. On the beard.

“You're a true gentleman, Arthur Morgan,” she said. “She's lucky. That woman. I hope she knows it.”

And she went to the cart.

Arthur stood still in the clearing. Hat in his hand. Cheek warm.

On the other side of the cart, Ellie had heard everything.

She hadn't wanted to. But she had. She'd been brushing the same horse for ten minutes, the same spot on its neck, which was already gleaming.

When Arthur came around the cart to check the lashings, she was waiting.

Leaning on the wheel. Arms crossed. With the biggest grin Arthur had ever seen on her face.

“My heart belongs to another woman,” said Ellie, in a deep cowboy voice, awful.

Arthur stopped.

“Ellie.”

“You're the most beautiful woman I ever saw laugh.”

“Ellie, I swear to God.”

“She told me no once, and she was right to,” Ellie went on, hand on her chest, gazing at the sky, tragic. “I tried to forget. I can't.”

“You were listening.”

“I was brushing the horse.”

“You were listening.”

“The horse is shining, Arthur. Look at this horse.” She pointed. “I brushed this horse for ten minutes so I wouldn't have to hear it, and I heard everything anyway. It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard in my life. And I've been in a sewer in Seattle.”

Arthur went red to the ears.

“You don't understand nothing.”

“I understand you're the biggest romantic I've ever met.” Ellie shook her head, pitying him. “Four days. Four days, Arthur. Drawing her in profile. It's a horse in profile. Putting your hand on her knee at the gate. Worst day of my life. And at the end, when the woman leans on you, you take off your hat and give a ten-minute speech about somebody else.”

“It was two minutes.”

“It was ten. I counted. I counted crows the whole trip, I know how to count.”

Arthur huffed. Grabbed the lashing rope. Pulled it harder than he needed to.

“Get on the cart.”

“Who is she?”

“Get on the cart, Ellie.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Ellie.”

“Does she have a name? Say the name. Just the name.”

Arthur stood still with the rope in his hand.

“Mary,” he said. Softly. Without meaning to.

Ellie went quiet.

Because she saw his face as he said the name. And for one second, just one, she stopped finding it funny.

Then she found it funny again.

“Mary,” she repeated, in the cowboy voice. “Oh, Mary.”

“I'm gonna leave you on the road.”

“No, you're not.”

He didn't.

They got back to Corvo Bianco in four days.

Triss on the box, beside Arthur, talking about horses, and roads, and goat cheese. Laughing. Same as before. Nothing strange. As if the clearing had never happened, or as if it had happened the right way.

And Ellie in the back, on top of an empty barrel, humming softly, the whole trip, a song she made up on the spot, that had only one word.

Mary, Mary, Mary.

Arthur didn't look back once.

But on the second night, at camp, when everyone was asleep, he opened his notebook. And wrote, in his crooked handwriting:

The redheaded girl is insufferable.

Triss is the bravest woman I ever met.

And I still think about Mary every night. Don't even know if she exists anymore. Don't even know what world she's in. But I think about her.

God help me, Ellie's right.

Fourth Tale — The Mystery of the Redhead

I. The Question

The question came from Ellie, on a rainy night, in the Corvo Bianco kitchen.

Everyone was there. Which was rare. Geralt with his glass of wine, boots up on the bench. Arthur drawing in his notebook. Jin sitting on the floor, near the fire, cross-legged, sharpening his katana with a stone, slowly. V sprawled in the rocking chair, one leg over the armrest, eating grapes off the bunch.

And Ellie at the table, chin propped on her hand, looking out the window.

At the light in the workshop, across the courtyard.

On.

It was nearly midnight. The workshop light had been on since lunch.

“What does she do for fun?” asked Ellie.

No one answered.

“Aloy,” Ellie went on. “Seriously. Does anyone know? I've been here for months. She wakes up before the sun. Goes to the workshop. Comes out to eat, sometimes. Goes back to the workshop. When she's not in the workshop, she's out in the woods after iron, or stone, or plants, to bring back to the workshop. She never drinks. She never plays anything. She never stops.”

She turned to the others.

“How does anybody live like that? How is somebody so... focused?” She lowered her voice. “What if she's a machine?”

V stopped chewing her grape.

“Like a robot,” said Ellie. “In disguise. She comes from a world full of machines. She talks to the machines. Maybe she's one of them.”

“It's none of our business,” said Jin.

Without taking his eyes off the blade. The stone going up and down. Calm.

“She chooses how to spend her time. That is hers. Not ours.”

“Oh, come on,” said Arthur, without taking his eyes off his notebook. “Even you, samurai. Even the most by-the-book samurai in the world drinks. I saw you knocking back that rice wine you got Aloy to distill. Two cups. And you sang.”

Jin stopped the stone.

“I did not sing.”

“You did. A song about a heron. Real sad. I was there.”

“It was a poem.”

“It was a song, Jin. Melody and everything.”

Jin went back to sharpening his sword. A little harder.

“It's true,” said Ellie. “Everyone's got something. Arthur's got the notebook. Jin's got the poems. V's got...” She looked at V. “V's got the mare.”

“Pinot isn't a hobby,” said V. “Pinot is family.”

“Even Geralt has something,” Ellie went on. “The witcher games.”

Everyone turned to Geralt.

Geralt took a sip of wine.

“Hm,” he said.

“What witcher games?” asked V.

“At Kaer Morhen,” Geralt said, slowly, “in winter, when the snow closes the pass and there are no more contracts, we spend months inside. Nothing to do. So we make things up.”

“Like what?” asked Ellie.

Geralt thought.

“There's the one with the frogs,” he said.

“The one with the frogs.”

“You catch a frog. One of the big ones, from the lower lake. Take a straw.” He made a small, precise gesture with two fingers. “Stick the straw in the frog. From behind. And blow.”

Silence.

“And the frog fills up,” Geralt went on, with the most serious face in the world. “Like a bladder. Then you let it go in the lake. Whoever's frog floats longest wins.”

Arthur stopped drawing.

V spat out her grape.

Jin dropped the whetstone on the floor.

Ellie stared at Geralt with her mouth open, with an expression of absolute horror, as if he'd just confessed to a murder.

“From behind,” she said.

“From behind.”

“You used to blow up frogs. From behind.”

“Lambert was the champion.” Geralt shrugged. “He had the lungs.”

“I'm never going to be able to look you in the face again,” said V.

“Hm.”

“The point,” said Ellie, when everyone had stopped grimacing, “is that even Geralt has a way to have fun. A disgusting one. But he has one. Two, if you count Gwent, which he plays with anything that breathes. And Aloy doesn't.”

She slapped the table.

“I want to find out.”

Jin picked the whetstone up off the floor.

“This is a terrible idea,” he said.

“You in?”

Jin was quiet.

He looked at the workshop light, across the courtyard.

And sighed.

“I will watch,” he said. “To make sure no one does anything dishonorable.”

“He's in,” said Arthur.

II. The Experiments

The first theory was Arthur's.

“Drinking,” he said. “Nobody's ever taken her out for a proper drink. A good tavern. A good table. Music. Everybody together. Nobody can resist that.”

They took her to Beauclair on a Saturday. Said it was to buy iron at the market. It was a lie, but it was a good lie, because Aloy really did buy iron.

Then, the tavern. The best one in Beauclair. The one by the bridge, with music, with tables out on the street, with the river running underneath and lanterns hanging overhead. Arthur ordered a jug of wine. Filled everyone's cups. Filled Aloy's.

Aloy looked at the cup.

“No, thanks.”

“It's just one.”

“I don't drink that.”

“Why not?”

Aloy considered the question seriously. The way she considered everything.

“It slows down your reasoning,” she said. “I tested it once. In my world. One cup. For two hours, it took me twice as long to do math in my head.” She made a face. “It was horrible. I don't understand why anyone would do that on purpose.”

She ordered grape juice.

And spent the whole night drinking grape juice, very content, explaining to the tavern owner why the water wheel on his mill under the bridge was losing power, and sketching on a napkin how to fix it.

The tavern owner fixed it the following week. He sent a barrel of wine to Corvo Bianco as a gift. Aloy gave it to Arthur.

The second theory was V's.

“She needs someone,” said V. “A boyfriend. A girlfriend. Something. Nobody lives on workshop alone.”

The Beauclair harvest ball was the following week. The duchess invited everyone. V dragged Aloy there with the excuse that there was a crystal lamp in the main hall that kept flickering, which was true, because V had loosened it the day before.

Aloy fixed the lamp in four minutes.

Then V pointed out a knight. Handsome. Tall. Polite. With a well-groomed mustache. Who had been looking at Aloy for half an hour from across the hall, and whom V had paid to come ask her to dance.

He came. Gave a lovely bow. Asked.

Aloy danced with him.

And for the entire dance, she explained to him, with great enthusiasm, that the middle step of that Toussaint dance was mathematically identical to the movement pattern of a herd of grazer machines from her world, and that if he wanted she could draw him the diagram afterward.

The knight went back to his table very confused.

V tried again. With a lady this time. A sorceress from Vengerberg, gorgeous, black-haired, who had laughed at something Aloy said about magnets. V nudged the two of them toward the balcony. Watched from a distance.

The two talked for two hours.

About magnets.

At the end of the night, V gave up and asked her straight out. In the cart, on the way home.

“Aloy. You didn't like either of them?”

“I did. They were nice. The sorceress knew a lot about magnets.”

“No, like...” V made a vague gesture. “Like like. You know.”

Aloy understood. She thought for a moment.

“Oh,” she said. “No. I'm not interested in that. In anyone. Never have been.”

She said it in the simplest way in the world. The way someone says they don't like onions.

“Never?” asked V.

“Never.” Aloy shrugged. “I know for most people it's important. I get it. It's just not for me.”

V looked at her.

“That's okay,” she said, at last.

“I know it's okay,” said Aloy. And she smiled. “Why wouldn't it be?”

He didn't say a word. He just showed up at the workshop one afternoon, with a Gwent deck in his hand. Sat down at the workbench. And started shuffling.

Aloy looked at the cards.

“What's that?”

“Gwent.”

“Is it a game?”

Geralt stopped shuffling. He looked at her the way you look at someone who has asked whether water is wet.

“It's the game.”

He explained the rules. It took ten minutes. She asked eleven questions, all about exceptions not even he had thought of.

“What if I play the spy on a row that's under frost?”

“No one's ever done that.”

“Why not?”

Geralt opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Hm.”

They played.

Aloy lost the first match. Badly. Lost the second. Lost the third.

Geralt won all three in silence, with the most serious face in the world. But Ellie, who was in the workshop doorway pretending she wasn't spying, swore afterward that she saw the corner of his mouth go up.

In the fourth match, Aloy didn't play a single card. She just stared at the table. At the cards that had already been played. For a long time.

“Again,” she said.

“You lost three.”

“I know. Again.”

She won the fourth.

Geralt stared at the table.

“Luck.”

“It wasn't.”

She won the fifth. Lost the sixth. Won the seventh, the eighth and the ninth, each one faster than the last. In the tenth, Geralt played a weather card she had never seen, and won.

Aloy picked up the card. Turned it over. Looked at the back.

“This card wasn't in your deck.”

“I have other decks.”

“How many?”

Geralt shrugged.

“Hm.”

A chest. He had a whole chest.

And that was when it happened.

Ellie saw it up close, and said afterward it was like watching someone get bitten. Aloy put down her file. Pushed the gear to the corner of the workbench. Looked at Geralt with a face no one at Corvo Bianco had ever seen on her before.

“Show me the chest.”

What came after, Ellie called the fever.

The workshop light stayed on until midnight. But it wasn't because of gears. The workbench disappeared under cards. Cards bought from every merchant in Beauclair, from every faction: Northern Realms, Nilfgaard, Scoia'tael, Monsters. On the wall, nailed up, an enormous sheet of paper with every card that existed, one by one, with its strength, its row and its ability, in her small, neat handwriting. Below it, another sheet. With calculations.

She built decks. Took them apart. Built them again.

And played alone. On both sides of the workbench. She'd play a round, get up, walk around, sit in the other chair, and play against herself.

“She's playing by herself,” said Arthur, looking through the workshop window.

“She is training,” said Jin.

Geralt said nothing. He went down to the cellar. And came back with the chest.

No one planned it. But it became a war.

Breakfast: cards. Lunch: cards. Dinner: cards. A match in the stable, on top of a hay bale, with Pinot looking over her stall with a judgmental face. A match in the rain, in the courtyard, because neither of them would get up when it started raining.

On the kitchen wall, someone scratched the score with the tip of a knife. Two columns. G and A. A little tally mark for each win.

“That's a house wall, for fuck's sake,” said Ellie.

No one heard.

And then began the part the rest of Corvo Bianco could no longer stand.

Geralt had always had a flaw. Everyone in Toussaint knew it. He'd ask anyone. The blacksmith. The priest. The duchess's messenger, in the middle of delivering a message. A man he'd just pulled out of a drowner's claws, still lying in the mud, coughing up river water.

“Play Gwent?”

Now there were two of them.

At the Beauclair market, the two of them reached the same iron stall at the same time, looked at the merchant at the same time, and asked at the same time. The merchant played with both of them. Lost to both. Closed his stall early.

Aloy asked the guard at the palace gate, while delivering a water pump the duchess had ordered. The guard said he was on duty. Aloy said it'd be quick. It was quick. The guard lost in six minutes and stared at the cards in his hand as if they had betrayed him.

Geralt asked the drowner man again, a week later, when the fellow came by to say thanks with a basket of cheese. Aloy was standing right there.

“After me,” she said.

They asked Jin. Jin accepted, out of courtesy. He played with the concentration of a man in a real duel, laying every card on the table with both hands. He lost in nine minutes. He stood. He bowed.

“It was a fair defeat,” he said.

And never sat at that table again.

They asked Arthur. Arthur played a whole match with Aloy explaining, out loud, as he played, why every one of his cards was a mistake.

“This is like poker,” Arthur said at the end. “Except you can't lie. No fun.”

“You can lie,” said Aloy. “You're just bad at it.”

Arthur was quiet a while. Then he went to get his notebook and didn't come back.

V didn't even let them finish the question.

“No. Not a chance. I've seen what this did to you two.”

Ellie said she'd play if it was for money.

“It's no fun betting,” said Aloy, “if I already know I'm going to win.”

Ellie thought about that.

“Then no.”

By the end of the second week, the owner of the bridge tavern hung a sign on the door, handwritten, with a badly drawn wolf and a red-haired head next to it.

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ASK THE CUSTOMERS IF THEY PLAY GWENT.

Geralt read the sign. Aloy read the sign.

The two of them went in. Sat at the corner table. And played each other until closing.

And by the end of the third week, Aloy taught the game to the eight-year-old daughter of one of the vineyard workers, just to test a theory about how people learn strategy. The girl beat Geralt in her first match.

Geralt spent the whole dinner without speaking.

Which, to be fair, wasn't much different from any other dinner. But it was different. Everyone felt it.

Arthur thought Ellie would give up. That was it. Aloy had a game. Mystery solved.

Ellie didn't give up.

“That's not fun,” she said, in the kitchen, looking at the score scratched into the wall. “Look at her face when she plays. She doesn't laugh. She doesn't swear. She takes notes. She plays cards the same way she fixes a mill.”

“She likes it,” said Arthur.

“A robot can like math too,” said Ellie. “Still a robot.”

From the courtyard, through the window, came Geralt's voice.

“Again.”

And Aloy's.

“You're going to lose again.”

“Hm.”

The third theory was Geralt's.

The fourth theory was Jin's. Who had no theory. Who had said he would only watch.

But one morning, very early, before sunrise, he knocked on the workshop door. With a tray. A clay teapot. Two small cups, without handles. Green leaves, dried, that he had found with a merchant from Zerrikania and that were almost, almost the same as the ones from his island.

“Tea,” he said. “In my land, it is something done slowly. To calm the mind.”

Aloy let him in.

Jin made the tea his way. Slowly. In silence. Every gesture measured, every movement at the right moment. The water at the exact temperature. The leaves in the exact amount. The cup turned twice before offering it.

Aloy watched very closely.

And after she drank, she said:

“That was good. The water was about five degrees below boiling. Was that on purpose?”

“It was.”

“Why?”

“Because if it boils, the leaf turns bitter.”

Aloy nodded. Picked up her notebook. And wrote it down. Green leaf tea: water at ~95 degrees. Boiling = bitter.

Jin looked at the notebook.

And for the first time in his life, Jin Sakai wanted to laugh in a way that wasn't polite.

He didn't laugh.

But almost.

III. The Tower

At the end of a month, Ellie gathered everyone in the kitchen again.

“Okay,” she said. “Report.”

“She doesn't drink,” said Arthur. “Says it slows down her math.”

“She doesn't want anyone,” said V. “And she's fine with it. Actually fine.”

“She's forty-one to thirty-nine at Gwent,” said Geralt. In a resentful voice. “Her favor.”

“She took notes on the tea,” said Jin.

Ellie rested her forehead on the table.

“It's a robot,” she said, muffled. “It's a robot. I knew it. She does everything with precision. Even Gwent she plays like math. She doesn't like anything the way everyone else likes things, she doesn't waste time on anything, she never stops. She's a robot that came from a world of robots.”

“She's not a robot,” said V.

“How do you know?”

“I scanned her on the first day. She's got a heart. Beats just like yours.”

Ellie raised her head.

“Then what does she do?”

No one knew.

Ellie found out by accident.

A week later. On a night when she couldn't sleep, which was most nights back then. On those nights she walked. Through the vineyard, the courtyard, the stable. Counting things, which was what made her head go quiet.

And that night she went to the tower.

Corvo Bianco had an old tower, stone, in the corner of the wall, from before the vineyard was a vineyard. No one used it. Geralt kept old barrels on the ground floor. At the top, there was an open terrace, with a low parapet, from which you could see all of Toussaint.

Ellie climbed the spiral stairs in the dark.

And when she reached the top, she stopped.

Aloy was there.

Lying on her back on the stone terrace. On a blanket. Hands behind her head. Focus switched off. Looking at the sky.

And all around her, spread over the whole terrace, held down with little stones so they wouldn't blow away, papers.

Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Full of dots. Full of lines connecting the dots. Full of numbers. Of notes in her small, neat handwriting. Of arrows, of circles, of drawings of spheres one inside another.

Ellie crouched. Picked one up.

It was the sky. The sky over Toussaint, on a summer night. Every star marked. With a name Aloy had given it. With the date. With the hour. With the position.

She picked up another. The same sky. A month later. The stars shifted a little.

Another. Another. Another.

Months. Almost a year. Every night.

“Ellie?” said Aloy, without turning her head.

“Sorry. I didn't know you were up here.”

“I'm up here every night.” Aloy pointed to the space beside her on the blanket. “Sit. If you want.”

Ellie sat.

And looked up.

The sky over Toussaint, moonless, cloudless, was the fullest thing she had ever seen. Fuller than the sky over Jackson. Much fuller. So many stars it looked like dust.

“That one,” said Aloy, pointing. “The red one. Near the horizon.”

“I see it.”

“It moves differently from the others. The others all turn together, around a point up there.” She pointed overhead. “But that one goes backward, sometimes. Three weeks forward, one week back. That means it isn't a star. It's a world. Like this one. Going around the same sun.”

Ellie looked at the red dot.

“A world?”

“A world. And there are three more. I've found four so far.” Aloy's voice had changed. Ellie noticed. It wasn't her workshop voice, matter-of-fact, the voice of someone explaining a valve. It was something else. Faster. Warmer. “And you know what's the most incredible part? None of these stars are mine. I looked. I drew every constellation from my sky from memory and compared. None of them match. Not one. Which means either we're very, very far from my world, in another part of the sky, or we're under a completely different sky. In another... another everything. And if that's it, then the spheres Geralt talks about, the Conjunction, they aren't places, they're whole skies, stacked up, and Ciri passes from one to another, and if she passes, then there's a path between them, and if there's a path, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured...”

She stopped to breathe.

And kept going.

She talked for three hours.

Ellie didn't understand half of it.

It didn't matter.

She lay beside her on the blanket, looking at the stars, listening. Aloy talked about light that takes years to arrive. About stars that might already have died and that we still see. About a cloud of glowing dust near the horizon that she thought was a cluster of stars very far away, all together. About how the sky of her world had been the only thing the Old Ones hadn't ruined. About how she used to lie on the roof of Rost's cabin, when she was little, and look up until she fell asleep, and Rost would climb up in the middle of the night and cover her with a hide without saying a word.

She talked without stopping. Without hurrying. Without looking at Ellie. With her hand in the air, drawing lines between the stars.

And Ellie, lying beside her, looked at her face in the dark.

And saw it.

Aloy was happy.

Not content. Not satisfied. Happy. With her whole face. In a way Ellie had never seen Aloy be anywhere, not in the workshop, not on the road, not at the kitchen table.

That was it.

That had been it all along.

When the sky began to lighten in the east, Aloy stopped talking.

She was quiet a while. And then she turned her head toward Ellie, for the first time the whole night, looking a little embarrassed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I talked too much.”

“You did.”

“I do that. When it's about this.” She looked at the sky. “Rost used to say I saw the world from higher up than other people. That when something caught me, it caught all of me, and I couldn't see anything else around me. The other kids in the tribe thought it was weird. Thought I was weird. Because of that, and other things.” She shrugged. “I never could do what they did for fun. It didn't make sense to me. And this did.” She pointed at the stars. “This always did.”

Ellie looked at her.

“You're not weird,” she said.

Aloy laughed.

“I'm a little weird.”

“Okay. A little.” Ellie smiled. “But you're not a robot.”

Aloy frowned.

“Who said I was a robot?”

Ellie went very quiet.

“Nobody,” she said.

IV. Everyone's Engine

The next night, Ellie told the others.

In the kitchen. With the workshop light off, for the first time in a long while, because Aloy had gone to bed early so she could climb the tower before dawn.

She told them everything. The papers. The red star that goes backward. The three hours. Rost covering her with the hide. Her face.

When she finished, nobody said anything for a while.

“Stars,” said Arthur, at last.

“Stars.”

“All this time. Us dragging her to taverns, to balls, playing cards. And all you had to do was look up.”

“All you had to do was look up.”

V was quiet in the rocking chair. Quieter than usual.

“Back home there was a name for that,” she said.

Everyone looked at her.

“For the way she is.” V rolled a grape between her fingers. “In Night City. The docs had names. Autism. Hyperfocus. A bunch of long words.” She shrugged. “It means the head works differently. Not worse. Different. That one thing grabs a person whole, and they go deep, way deeper than everyone else. That what's fun for other people isn't fun for her, and what's fun for her, other people don't get. That she sees details nobody else sees, and counts cards, and writes down the temperature of the tea.”

Jin raised his eyes from his sword.

“And is that bad?” he asked.

“It's not anything,” said V. “It's just how her engine was built.” She laughed. “Mine's the opposite, you know? My head jumps from one thing to another, to another, to another, a mile a minute, can't stay on just one. Hers grabs one and never lets go.”

She spent a while looking out the window. At the tower, over in the corner of the wall, dark.

“I think she's the smartest person I've ever met,” said V. “And we thought she was a robot because she didn't want any wine.”

Geralt took a sip of wine.

“Hm,” he said.

And everyone understood that that hm meant: we were very stupid.

After a while, he set down his glass.

“And Gwent?” he asked.

“What about it?” said V.

“Is that also...” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “The engine.”

V laughed.

“Gwent is the engine finding another road, witcher. When it catches, it catches all the way.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You should understand that better than anyone. You ask people if they play Gwent while they're still coughing up drowner water.”

“Hm.”

“She's not going to stop, Geralt. Not ever.”

Geralt thought about that. He looked at the score scratched into the wall. At the two columns. At column A, two tally marks longer than his.

He took a sip of wine.

“Good,” he said.

And anyone who knew Geralt of Rivia understood that, for the first time in almost a hundred years, he had a real rival. And that he was very, very happy about it.

Maybe Geralt of Rivia had a hyperfocus on Gwent.