Chapter Text
"Have mercy, Your Grace!" Le Goff cried in a trembling voice. "Have mercy!"
The duchess's face was set like flint. "The time for mercy is past," she said coldly. "If you resented the mercy that I showed to someone else, why should you obtain mercy yourself?"
Le Goff bowed his head and bit his lip. Tremblay and Tristan du Chemin stood on either side of him with blank faces. None of them looked any of the others in the eye as they faced the duchess for the pronouncement of their sentences. While the chamberlain still hoped to be saved by some miracle, the minister of justice and the young knight had already resigned themselves to the prospect of being hanged, drawn, and quartered.
There was a sudden commotion outside the door. Damien de la Tour quickly went to see what was going on. He returned and came back with Syanna, who had been attempting to bully her way past the guards into the courtroom. She immediately rushed to the foot of Anna Henrietta's elevated throne.
"Have mercy, Anarietta," Syanna said urgently, looking up at her sister.
Anna Henrietta rose from her seat. "What are you saying, Lady Sylvia Anna? These men have been found guilty of high treason. Tristan du Chemin plotted to murder you. Victor Tremblay and Sebastian Le Goff plotted to murder me." She paused to take a breath to steady her slightly quavering voice. "They have been afforded due process, and the law of the land is being followed. They shall receive the penalty prescribed by the law, which they so ardently respect. Yes," she said, fixing the guilty men with her gaze, "they respect it so much that they wished to rid the duchy of a ruler who supposedly flouted the law by not prosecuting her sister to the law's fullest extent."
Syanna did not look around at the men behind her. "Why did you have mercy on me then?" she asked. "When I had caused the deaths of four people in your duchy in trying to exact my revenge outside of the law?"
"Lady Sylvia Anna," the duchess said severely, "you are interrupting the proceedings."
"Your Grace, I beseech you; answer me," Syanna said, clasping her hands together and bringing them to her chest, a gesture that was unusual for her. "I shall not leave of my own accord otherwise."
The duchess laid a hand on the ornamental orb adorning the armrest of her throne. "This is very irregular, but I will allow you to speak. I will even allow myself to speak, so listen, all of you!" She looked around at everyone present in the courtroom. "The principle of proportional retributive justice is that the punishment must fit the crime. Is that not so, Victor Tremblay?"
The minister of justice nodded, his face ashen.
"In her youth," Anna Henrietta continued, addressing the court rather than Syanna, "Lady Sylvia Anna suffered a punishment vastly disproportionate to the so-called crimes that she had committed. She played a childish prank on an ambassador. In return, her parents—our parents—stripped her of her title and rights and exiled her." She quickly glanced down at Syanna's face; Syanna's expression was particularly stony, which meant that she was suppressing some strong emotion. "She suffered terrible abuse at the hands of those who brought her into exile. She had no hope of due process, no recourse to the law. Consequently, she took justice into her own hands by punishing those who had abused her. I do not deny that what she did was a crime. I thought it fair, however, that, since she had suffered from excessive punishment to begin with, leniency should be shown her."
At these words, Tremblay reflexively reached his hand up to fiddle with his chain of office, but he had already been stripped of the chain; his fingers grasped thin air. Anna Henrietta noticed this and sneered.
"I have since been informed by multiple people that my leniency was excessive. I am determined to not make the same mistake again. I shall strive to mete out punishments exactly proportionate to the crimes from now on," the duchess concluded. "Does that satisfy you, Lady Sylvia Anna?"
The two of them looked at each other silently for a time.
"Sister," Syanna said, "your heart has grown hard, but mine has grown soft. You have already refused my petition for a pardon for these men, so I ask that their sentences be commuted to banishment. We have not been harmed; there is no need to take a life for a life. I do not wish to be the cause of any more deaths."
Anna Henrietta said nothing. Syanna bowed her head and looked down at the steps of the throne.
"I see that you will not hear my plea concerning them. Be that as it may," Syanna said, finally turning to face Tremblay, Le Goff, and Tristan, "I forgive these men. And in forgiving, I hope to be forgiven."
They stared at her mutely. Syanna turned back to Anna Henrietta.
"I have one more petition on my own behalf," Syanna said. "No; more accurately, it is a declaration, for it is within my own power to do this. Listen well, Your Grace. You returned my title and birthright to me. True, they were wrongfully taken from me when I was exiled, and I did once deserve to have them given back to me. But when I had the four knights killed, I lost my right to them."
"No," the duchess interrupted, starting down the steps. "Stop, Syanna—"
"Let this court be witness to my words," Syanna stubbornly continued, raising her voice over Anna Henrietta's protests. "I hereby relinquish my title and my birthright. I am no longer the Lady Sylvia Anna, sister to the duchess of Toussaint. I have no right of inheritance to the ducal seat. Let it never be said again that Her Enlightened Ladyship the Duchess Anna Henrietta prizes her sister over the duchy of Toussaint."
"At least to the southern pass," Geralt said.
"No, Geralt, you don't have to accompany me anywhere," Regis said, leaning over the balustrade and looking out at the palace gardens with its blanket of freshly fallen snow glistening serenely in the bright moonlight. The moon was full again. "I'll fly out after midnight."
"If that's what you want," Geralt said. "You know, the duchess might just forget you're in the guest rooms if you don't go out of your way to look for her. You could stay here forever."
Regis laughed and shook his head. He had stayed at the palace for nearly two weeks at the invitation (so to speak) of the duchess, who had been extremely concerned for him after he had drunk the poisoned wine. To save his friend from being poked and prodded by a parade of court physicians, Geralt had convinced the duchess that Regis would be all right as he had spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder, and so Regis had taken advantage of the opportunity to simply rest in one place and enjoy Geralt's quite frequent visits. It was simple enough for Regis to avoid other vampires if he never strayed beyond a few chambers and rooms in the palace.
Now it was time to move on.
"It's been good to see you. Come to Vicovaro when you can," Regis said, "and send my regards to Lady Yennefer and your Cirilla when you see them."
"I will," Geralt said with a suppressed sigh. He was reluctant to let Regis go. It would be a quiet winter.
"I have one more person to see before I go," Regis said, turning to look at the towering facade of the palace, which seemed to reach into the sky to form a fairytale backdrop behind them. "I think I see her."
Geralt flinched.
"It's not Fringilla," Regis said quickly.
"Good," Geralt said, letting go of the sigh.
Syanna, who was now truly simply Syanna, paced back and forth along the length of the small balcony in front of her room. All of Toussaint would learn of her new status tomorrow. Tonight she wanted to be alone.
She suddenly stopped pacing, pulled her black woollen cloak tightly around herself, and looked up at the moon.
Did you love me?
"After being discarded like a piece of trash," she said softly, "to have someone worship the ground you walk on—who wouldn't want that? How could I not love you for how much I thought you loved me?
"In you I found security. In you I found warmth. In short, in you I found what I had been forcibly deprived of when I was a child."
Why did you leave?
"I needed love, but I also needed space.
"You would not have understood that.
"You loved not as humans love. Your passion frightened me. Your possessiveness scared me. You never knew that, did you? You never knew that, because I could not tell you. I was afraid to tell you.
"In the end, I feared that the fire of your love—if one could call what you had love—would consume me utterly. Yes, I feared you. So I left.
"If you could have been like Regis's cloak, Dettlaff, gently embracing me with your warmth, yet still allowing me to move freely, I would never have left you."
How could you manipulate and use me?
"I have no excuse for what I did, but I can tell you what I was thinking.
"After I left you, loneliness became my companion once again. And I thought about the ones who had left me with it, who had abused me and abandoned me.
"If my security has become dangerous to me, I thought, let it now threaten those who once threatened me. If I cannot enjoy the warmth of my fire, I thought, let it at least burn my enemies..."
Did you not think of the consequences for me?
"I did not think that you could be hurt. I did not think that you could die. I did not think... that your own blood brother—"
Syanna stifled a gasp as she finally noticed the vampire quietly waiting in the doorway of the balcony. She felt foolish at being caught talking to herself—or, rather, talking to Dettlaff as if he were still alive—but, more than that, she felt guilt and regret.
"Regis," she said, not daring to meet his eyes, "I am so, so sorry."
Regis gently lifted a finger to his lips. "Now, Syanna, don't speak at all, I beg you. Just let me talk to him." He joined Syanna on the balcony and looked up at the moon.
"I am sorry, brother, that I did not mourn you," Regis began. "I have simply been unable to grieve. So, let me eulogize you now: you had a noble heart and were capable of the most selfless deeds. I am alive and walking now because of you. Your blood, which flows in my veins, will not allow me to forget you; even if I could forget you, I would not want to.
"I am sorry that all my efforts to save you came to naught.
"I tried very hard, Dettlaff; believe me, I tried. I tried because you gave me more than my fair share of chances. You gave me a chance when we were striplings and I was a drunk fool. You gave me a chance when you found me as an atomized spatter on a pillar. You gave more of yourself than was necessary; certainly, you gave me more than I deserved.
"So, when my turn came to pay you back, I tried very hard to help you, but you would not accept my help. I gave you chance after chance after chance, but... you squandered them."
Regis looked down at his hand and meditatively twisted his ring around his finger. He looked back up at the moon.
"What a paradox you were, Dettlaff. When we were young you were the paragon of self-control among us, and you urged me to exercise self-control, to stop drinking, to stop abusing blood. It was a very limited understanding of self-control that we had then, for where was that self-control when you unleashed your anger on an entire city of people who had nothing to do with your personal vendetta?
"Don't excuse yourself by appealing to your unique gifts. You were not a mindless beast. You had some passions you were glad to rein in, and others that you simply refused to rein in. When I tried to teach you what I had learned from the Humanist, I saw very well that you were far from being unable to understand what I was telling you. You just did not wish to understand.
"You knew, in the end, that I was right.
"So, when you were lying there in Tesham Mutna at the mercy of the witcher, at my mercy, why didn't you just admit that I was right? If you had opened your mouth and asked to be spared, to be given just one more chance, I would have given it then and there.
"Why did you let me kill you?
"Did you think you had lost my love forever? Did you think that I could not or would not forgive you?
The moon looked down at Regis. The droplet-shaped icicles adorning the balustrade caught the silvery light. They shone like tears.
"You were wrong, brother.
"I forgive you."
Finally, Themis and I are alone again, in the darkness where her figure is outlined only by some mysterious bluish glow that seems to accompany her whenever she appears to me. The scales have never left her hand. The blindfold and sword are back in place on her person where they belong. Maybe this time I can have the scales. Maybe if I try asking another way.
"What do the scales say about Syanna?" I ask.
"Why do you ask?" Themis loves questioning my motives.
"I want to know—I want to do what's good. Please, give me the scales." Yes, Themis can tell me what the scales say, but I need to feel the heft of the scales in my hand myself, too. So I make my request, and I hope I've put it humbly enough.
Themis is silent for a while. I've offended her by asking again, perhaps. After an indeterminate amount of time, she speaks. "My scales only tell me what is just. They are still not yours to take." A sudden burst of light like St. Elmo's fire seems to flash from the scales. I take a step back. Themis takes a step towards me. "The sword, however..."
Somewhere, something falls into place. "If I can't have the scales," I say slowly, trying to carefully capture my realization in words before it flies away, "I don't want the sword."
Themis smiles.
Regis closed his eyes and sighed as he recalled the dream. He finally turned to Syanna, who had been observing him with her sad eyes throughout his monologue. She spoke.
"That morning, by the campfire, you said that you could not forgive me."
"I did, but I was wrong. I can, and I do."
They both contemplated the snow, the beautiful white mantle that lay on everything so softly and covered over every imperfection so perfectly and thoroughly.