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The child that walked through the gates alongside thirty-seven others was less wild than when Alzur first purchased him from his mother. Erland peered up at the tall, foreboding towers of Rissberg castle and felt fear lick up his spine. They had been told they would take part in revolutionary experiments. These experiments would change the world; Erland, and others like him, would combat the plague of monsters ravaging the Continent. It was their destiny.
Uneducated and aggressive, Erland found it difficult to adjust to the training regime. Not because it was brutal—he had spent the first ten years of his life at sea fighting for his own survival—but because they expected him to read and learn his letters. It didn’t help that the huge manuscripts seemed to change almost daily. Reports flooded back about new monsters with different characteristics almost every week. A new monster meant a new entry in the bestiary, which, in turn, meant another damned essay.
“You look like you’re about to slay the book,” said a familiar voice one afternoon. Erland looked up from his reading with a faint scowl. His irritation faded a little when his gaze fell on the raven-haired girl, Jagoda. She was the smartest and wittiest of them all. Good with a sword, quick on her feet. She had earned Erland’s respect in the first few weeks, but he hadn’t really bonded with anyone. Not yet. It was difficult to find time and energy.
She pointed at the patch of ground at his side, and he shrugged. The old blossom tree was the biggest feature of the garden that sat in the centre of the courtyard, and Erland preferred to sit under it rather than occupy any of the benches around the outskirts. Sitting here, he could smell the herbs and the blooms more acutely. It drowned out the funk of the rest of the castle.
“What has he got you studying?” she asked, settling with her own manuscript on her lap. Her notes were more advanced than his; detailed, neat. Erland still struggled with the most basic sentences.
“Manticores,” he replied, “They come from the east, over the mountains. Shifting territory or something. Like cattle."
She giggled.
“What?”
“Your accent.” She gave him an apologetic smile, but her grey eyes still glittered with mirth. “You’re from Skellige, aren’t you?”
“Hindarsfjall,” he replied, allowing his manuscript to flop closed.
“You’re a pirate.”
“I ain’t a pirate,” Erland scowled.
She chuckled again. “Sorry,” she paused and then gasped in excitement. “Did you know anyone with a peg leg? Or an eye patch? What about one of those famous outlaws, like, uh -.”
He rolled his eyes. “Naw. You? Where you from?” He wasn’t as familiar with the tones and accents of the mainland. They all sounded much the same to him. Jagoda had darker skin than most of the others, bar two boys from Gemmeria and one from over the mountains, so he assumed she was from further south. She was the same deep chestnut as some of the nicer ships he’d been aboard, the kind where the men cleaned with seawater regularly and weren’t always drunk. Posh ships.
“Aedirn,” she said, smiling. “Well, my ma was at least. Can’t say much for my pa.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“You too, huh?”
“Vanja said he might have been an Aedirnian fisherman,” he paused, his face breaking into a smirk. “Eh, we could have the same pa.”
“We look nothing alike!”
“Our eyes are the same,” he said, ducking so he could look into the same stormy grey irises as his own. “And… uh, my hair’s quite dark.”
Jagoda squinted at him, feigning irritation, and then chuckled. Her humour was catching. “Alright, so say we have the same pa. What’s the likelihood that we both get picked up by Alzur? That’s like...” she looked skywards, recalling their arithmetic lesson on ratios, “a billion to one.”
“Billion isn’t a number.”
“It is.”
Now it was Erland’s turn to squint. He didn’t know enough to challenge her on arithmetic, but he did have a trump card. “Destiny,” he said smugly.
“Destiny,” she repeated, sceptical.
“Aye, destiny. Vanja said that if you deny destiny, you anger the gods and… somethin’ else big and cosmic. S’why she kept me. So she didn’t anger Freya.”
“So, it’s our destiny to undergo these new experiments, and—?”
“Save the world.” Erland puffed his chest.
She considered it; her lower lip rolled between her teeth. “How’re we going to save the world? We’re barely eleven winters.”
“The experiments will make us stronger; the training will make us good fighters, we’ll… yeah, our destiny is to save the world. Protect humanity and—.”
She patted his arm. He looked down at her hand as it rested at the crook of his elbow. “Alright,” she said, nodding. “We’ll save the world. I’m Jagoda, by the way.”
“I know,” Erland said, without thinking, and then flushed a deep claret. “I’m… uh, Erland. Erland’s my… name.”
“Well, Erland,” she said as she slumped back against the thick trunk of the blossom tree. “We better get this essay done. However will we save the world if our letters aren’t absolutely perfect?”
The training took the lives of four children. Erland watched as their small, broken bodies were thrown into a hastily dug pit behind the castle and tried to ignore the clawing fear in his chest. His own body was bruised and aching, some from the training, but also from the fights he kept getting pulled into by the others. The atmosphere was overwrought and tense, but they couldn't afford to hold onto their animosity for long. The children were called before the mages every day. Life at Rissberg castle was about survival, nothing else.
A couple of days later, necrophages clambered over the castle walls to claim the corpses. The mages ran out to banish them and then called the remaining initiates forward to deal with the last one. With Jagoda at his side, Erland slew his first beast. He would never forget the sound of silver slicing through flesh, how the bones cracked the black, oily blood spattered onto his clothes. It haunted his dreams that night, and he woke, sweating, to find Jagoda holding his hand. “It’s alright, little pirate. I’ve got you.”
It wouldn’t be the last time Jagoda comforted Erland through a nightmare, and sometimes he was able to return the favour. They bonded through the hardship, and they weren't the only ones.
As the trials and training became more intense, the children began to grow closer. The mages didn’t care about them. They weren’t deliberately cruel, but they viewed the children not as other human beings but as test subjects. Erland resented how they talked about him while he was there, prodding and poking at his building muscles like he was an animal. They made notes in their journals and pushed their way into his mind to evaluate his mental stability. He hated them. Hated every single one.
In some ways, he preferred their neglect. At least they left them to their own devices in the evenings, with very loose boundaries as to where they could go. Not beyond the castle walls. So, he and Jagoda sat on those walls and talked loudly about what assholes the mages were in hopes that that could hear from their laboratories. “Alzur is the worst, ” Jagoda threw her hands up. “His hands are like icicles, and he does this little snivelling thing when he thinks he’s onto a breakthrough.”
“Like this.” Erland imitated, and Jagoda chuckled, offering a little shove on the arm.
“Yeah, like that.” She folded her arms and gazed thoughtfully into the courtyard. “The blossom tree’s flowering.”
“Hm,” Erland hummed. “It’s getting warmer, not really a surprise; plants grow in the spring and summer, y’know.”
“I know that.” She glowered at him, and he took the kick on his shin. “But it didn’t last year. Maybe it’s us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I read in the library that blossoms are a warrior’s symbol in some cultures. Maybe the tree has seen us training and thinks we’re doing a good job.”
“Maybe,” Erland huffed. “Or it’s just sucking up all the blood we’re spilling on the cobblestones like some vampire tree.”
“A vampire tree,” she said dryly; Erland shrugged, and they broke into fits of laughter. They giggled together long into the night until one of the mages bellowed at them to get down and get to bed. They swaggered back into the castle, arms looped around each other, and decided that the blossom tree would be their warrior symbol too.
Jagoda was Erland’s best friend. The only one he’d ever had. When he felt at his lowest, she could always pull him from the depths of despair, and his ability to make her laugh never failed either. It didn’t matter how battered they were or how bleak the future looked. They had each other through the training. To nurse the bruises, the cuts and the broken bones. They resolved to stay together through thick and thin.
Their resolve began to falter when the mages started the next step. Every mealtime, they were given a mixture of mushroom stews and soapy alchemical teas. Erland spat his first serving out over the table, his eyes watering as the foul taste coated his tongue. The mage behind him slapped the back of his head and forced another cup into his hands. With a snarl, he knocked the first dose back in one.
It wasn’t long before the real impact of the concoctions became clear. Erland became faster, stronger, sharper. The weight of his sword felt lighter in the mornings and his body seemed to process injuries more swiftly. Sometimes he felt unwell on them, his stomach rejecting the toxic mixture of fungi and chemicals, but the results were always the same by the afternoon. Better, bigger, stronger. His transformation had begun.
The same could not be said for Jagoda or the other girls. As the course of tea and mushrooms progressed, she became ill. Her skin turned ashen, the whites of her eyes yellowed and became bloodshot. Some days she couldn’t lift her sword from the rack and sat in the shade to rest, sweat soaking through her shirt and trousers, and others she was too weak to leave her bed.
She wasn’t the only one. All the girls were suffering. It was like their bodies were rejecting the tea. “They’re just weak,” said one of the boys over dinner. The girls had all gone to bed to rest. “Girls just aren’t made for what we have to do.” Erland had his first fight in months that night, leaving his adversary bloody and wailing. He took the lash of the cane across his back and didn’t regret it for a single moment.
Later, he snuck into Jagoda’s dormitory and sat on the edge of her bed. “Hey, Oda,” he said softly. If she had found a deep sleep, he didn’t want to drag her from it.
Her eyes opened. “Hey,” she rasped. Her throat was raw from vomiting. “I can smell blood, did you—?”
“Got into a fight,” he said. “Nothin’ major.”
“Damned pirate,” she teased, and then broke into a hard cough that made her narrow shoulders quake. Erland gathered the bowl of water left for them to wash in the morning, and wetted the cloth on its side. As Jagoda’s eyes closed, he mopped her brow, her neck and her upper chest, trying to ease her discomfort.
“You’ll get through this,” he whispered. “You’re the best of all of us. Best with the sword, with balance. You’re just allergic to the tea, or maybe the mushrooms. It’ll pass.” She didn’t respond; her breathing had levelled and he let her sleep.
There was no one to chase him out of her dormitory, so he decided to sleep next to her that night. When she woke in the early hours of the morning with another harsh cough, he brought her cool water, placing the cup carefully to her cracked lips. She drank unsteadily, and he mopped the dribbles that escaped her mouth once she was done.
“I was wrong,” she said. Erland looked at her in confusion and she continued with a shaky smile. “You’re not a pirate at all. You’re a knight. You just… pretend to be a pirate so no one sees how good you are.”
“I ain’t no knight, Oda,” he said in soft amusement. “Not got the manners, can barely read. Not as good with the sword like you either.”
“Being a knight’s not about all that,” she rasped, nesting back down in her pillows. “It’s about your heart and always doing the right thing. It’s about protecting people, about loving them for no other reason than they exist.”
Erland said nothing. He held her hand as she fell asleep again.
The mages said that they were ready for the next step. The mages led the first batch of children to the laboratories, and the others listened to their tortured screams long into the night. They thought that would be the worst part—the screams, the pleas for mercy—but it wasn’t. The worst bit was when they went silent. The absence of their voices left a hollow emptiness; a void in which death and misery settled.
They threw their mangled bodies into pits again. Slightly deeper this time so that the necrophages wouldn’t come back. It became clear that the girls would suffer the most. They were the first to fade in the harnesses. Erland heard one of the mages mumbling something about hormones and ‘balance’, but he didn’t understand it. He didn’t want to understand it. Because understanding it made it real.
He sat with Oda beneath the blossom tree the night before they were due to take her. She needed fresh air, and there was really only place she wanted to be. The winds nudged petals free from the branches and they fell around them like sweet-smelling snow. “Is there anything you miss from home?” she asked. They had both been staring at their manuscripts blankly for some time.
“Uh,” Erland set his down, palms resting on his knees. “Yeah. The fjords are beautiful. Lush, and green. And in the spring? When they were in bloom? It’s the prettiest sight, Oda. I’ll take you there one day, an’... we’ll swim in the fjord, and I’ll take you to the top of the highest mountain. Maybe we can sneak into Kaer Hemdall too.”
She smiled and reached across to squeeze his hand. “You know what I miss?” she sighed wistfully. “Dancing.”
Erland’s brows knitted together. “Dancin’?”
“Yes, you know, to music. Two people in each other’s arms.”
“Oh, uh,” he scratched his chin. “The only dancin’ we ever did on the ships was a jig to a fiddle. Somethin’ like that?”
“Hm, not quite. Here.” She stood and held her hand down towards him. He blinked at it like she was offering him some alien object she’d just plucked from her backside. “Oh, c’mon, Erland. My last wish. Humour me?”
He grunted and took her hand as he stood. “Don’ say stuff like that. You’re gonna get through it.”
“You’re right.” She smiled weakly. They both knew he was wrong. Not a single girl had survived the trials—in fact, no one had—but Erland was hoping that Oda would be the first. She was the strongest yet. Never give up. Never give in.
“Okay, the first thing you need to do, is bow.”
“Bow?”
“Yes,” she fluttered her hands, “you know, like the messengers do to the mages.”
“Like this?” Erland tucked a hand behind his back and placed the other on his chest before dipping forward. He kept his eyes on her, seeking approval.
“Yes!” she said, clapping her hands. “Now I,” she picked up pretend skirts, pinching finger and thumb together, “curtsy, like a lady.”
He snickered. “A lady.” She thumped him on the arm, which he rubbed with a mock scowl, even though it was too feeble to hurt. She used to be able to wrestle him into a headlock. He swallowed his dismay.
“Alright. Don’t get all squeamish on me, but you need to place a hand here,” she took his wrist and placed a palm at her waist. They had sparred and tussled for months in the training yards by this point; their bodies were familiar to each other. Erland still flushed a little. “Then, you take my other hand like this.”
“There ain’t any music, Oda,” he said, eyes flickering to and fro. She rested a hand on his shoulder and hummed thoughtfully.
“I know a tune. I don’t think I can sing it without coughing, but… I can hum?”
Erland considered it, glancing up at the empty windows of the castle. No one was watching them, and even if they were, he was fairly certain he would do whatever she asked anyway. “Sure, yeah,” he whispered.
They danced around the trunk of the blossom tree. Oda hummed the gentle melody she remembered from her homeland of Aedirn, occasionally pausing to praise his footwork. As Erland watched her face, trusting his feet to organise themselves under her guidance, he was struck by just how beautiful she was. Her skin was still sallow and grey, her eyes red and watery, but the petals of the blossom tree settled in her black curls and he could still see the mischief and intelligence in her smile, even through the pain. His Oda. Radiant, eternal.
As the melody finished and their gentle sway ended, he reached up to push a petal-laden curl from her face and she smiled at him. “Thank you, Ser Erland.” She leaned up and placed a kiss upon his cheek, which immediately flushed red beneath her lips.
It was that night that Erland resolved to become the man she thought he was. Not a Skelliger bastard destined for piracy, but a knight, with the good heart who always did what was right. That protected people and loved them no matter what. He would wear gleaming armour and earn the respect of every king and peasant on the Continent. For Oda.
She died the following week.
Erland listened to her as she screamed and sobbed. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks as he tried to sleep in his bunk and he scraped at them miserably. There was nothing he could do. Every time he tried to enter the laboratories, he was pushed away and told to return to his studies. He ended up halfway down corridors without even realising his feet had carried him there. With only the mages' dispassionate eyes as her last experience of this world, she died alone. In pain.
As the bodies were brought out, wrapped in linens stained with vomit and blood, Erland rallied the others. The unceremonious dumping of bodies needed to stop. These were their friends. Their family. All they had in this wretched existence. They deserved more.
He stormed the mortuary with a sword in his hand. His arm shook as he held it aloft, pointed at Alzur’s chest, misery and anger in his eyes. The mage considered Erland and his band of adepts, glancing back at his colleagues. Wordlessly, they decided to relinquish the bodies into Erland’s care. It would be interesting to see what the children did.
With the help of the surviving trainees, Erland carried the bodies out to a tall hill. In Skellige, warriors were burned. Their souls honoured by a prayer and then a banquet. They couldn’t have the latter—the mages would feed them pottage and rusks as they did every day—but Erland could make sure Oda received burial rites. She should be honoured like the warrior she was.
The children cut down trees with blunt axes and built a pyre for each of their peers. They pulled the bloodied, pus-stained sheets away and rested their corpses respectfully; legs together, hands on their chests, eyes closed. The mages didn’t protest when they took some training swords from the courtyard and placed one on each of the bodies.
Erland gazed down into Oda’s face once he had placed her upon her pyre. Her features had relaxed in death. She was the same sickly pallor as she had been in the weeks prior, but the pain was gone. With her eyes closed like this, her face soft, she looked like she was sleeping. But that’s what death was, wasn’t it? A peaceful, dreamless slumber. He placed a sprig from the blossom tree between her palm and the pommel of the sword in hopes her spirit would see and be gladdened. Where Erland had seen bloodshed and darkness in that courtyard, she had seen nobility and hope. She would carry it with her into the afterlife. “I’ll see you on the other side,” he whispered, leaning down to place a kiss on her forehead.
Erland struck a stone over the torch—this was before Cosimo had developed Signs, after all—and held it aloft. “Wait,” said one of the boys at his side. He was smaller than even Oda, his sandy blonde hair falling over dark brown eyes, “we should say something.”
“Like what?” Erland croaked, the misery raw in his chest.
“Like a Prayer,” the boy stopped, lips pressing together. “I don’t know what religion all of them are, but I can say something for Melitele?”
“I can do Kreve,” said another.
Erland grunted. A prayer. If the gods existed, then they had long since abandoned this group of children. But it wasn’t about his belief, was it? It was about their shared grief. About honouring the lost. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do Freya.”
A few others piped in with different gods—some he had never even heard of—and as he lit the pyres, a dozen voices murmured their prayers in unison; different languages, different accents. It didn’t matter though. They were united in their grief. Brothers-in-arms. Their fallen deserved to be honoured in this way. None had survived this new set of trials, and Erland expected that he too would have his pyre come the morrow.
He watched Oda until her body disappeared inside the flames and was the last one standing by the pyres as the others left. The walk back into the castle grounds was long and lonely, and by the time he stepped through the gates his eyes had cried themselves dry. He stood before Oda’s blossom tree—for it would always be hers now—and gazed up into its branches in search of strength.
The petals smelled sweet and conjured the memory of her smile through the mire of his anguish. He couldn’t help but smile back at that tiny glimmer of her. He remembered the promise he’d made as they danced together on that final evening, and his heart hardened. He would become a knight. He would protect people. He would be the man she thought he was all along. But for that, he needed to live.
His eyes dropped from the tree and met the passive gaze of Alzur, who was watching him from a tower window. To Alzur, Erland was nothing. Just an experiment. A laboratory mouse to scream and suffer and die under his hand. It didn’t matter to Alzur whether Erland survived, only that his death marked some progress, so the only reason the boy had to fight on was to preserve Oda’s memory. Erland drew in a final, deep breath of fresh air and blossoms, and then headed into the castle to face his fate.
He would go on to become the First Witcher, Erland of Larvik—famous for his exploits, his nobility and his wisdom. Kings would turn to him for advice and mages feared his power. When the Order fractured, he seized it as an opportunity to create a school built in Oda’s image, informed by the teachings of Gryphon, a noble knight he met barely a year after her passing.
Upon arriving at Kaer Seren, the very first thing he did was plant a blossom tree in the centre of the courtyard. No one asked him why and he didn’t offer them an explanation. The trainees got used to his presence beneath it as they trained, reading dispatches and penning letters. Sometimes they would glance at him from their dormitory windows at night, his voice drifting to them on the coastal winds. The old witcher talks to himself, they said; maybe age has turned him a bit mad.
No, the instructors would correct them, he’s talking to Oda.