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It was a terrible winter after a bad summer. The snow came early and we barely made it back up the mountain.
Lambert came last, ravaged by wound fever from an infected graveir bite. Usually, that’s not difficult to heal, but he’d run out of herbs. So had we all. Nothing had grown that year. Even normally plentiful herbs had been affected by hailstorms, torrential rains, and flooding everywhere.
It had been a miserable year on the path, but if anything the winter was worse. I’d never seen Lambert be so quiet. We did what we could for him, but it took weeks for the fever to break. Several times we were certain we’d lose him.
Before it was even midwinter, we had slaughtered all of Eskel’s goats. What little fodder we had, we had to reserve for the horses. The goats we could do without. And slaughtering them earlier meant there was still a little meat on them.
The lake and the river froze so deeply, we couldn’t hack holes in the ice to go fishing. Most animals had already succumbed to hunger. The land gave them as little as it gave us. So after the goats, we killed bears. They woke early from hibernation, having been unable to eat much in the autumn. Starving bears fed starving witchers for a while with their lean, tough meat.
We knew we had to leave. We can survive lean months, but our horses were quickly running out of hay and the ground was still frozen up in the mountains. Our only hope was that the rest of Kaedwen had fared better. At the very least, it should have grass for our horses.
We rode out in pairs. Lambert and I would go first, followed a week or so later by Vesemir and Eskel. People didn’t usually take well to seeing more than two of us at once.
Lambert was still not well. He had lost so much weight through injury, illness, and hunger, he’d had to punch extra holes in the straps of his armour to keep it from sliding off his body.
Hungry monsters had encroached on villages and people were glad to see us. We were offered a rich reward for killing two ice trolls who had been capturing anyone straying too far from their homes.
It was a tough, fiery fight, not made any better by the fact that I caught Lambert with an ill-timed Igni, singing his armour and leaving an angry red burn on his arm. He said it was fine and that shit happened. That he wasn’t furious made me seriously worry for his wellbeing. It was like he didn’t have the energy to spare to shout at me.
He did shout at the village elder when he told us our reward would have to wait until autumn.
We get cheated out of our pay frequently, but we rarely needed it as much as we did then. We had only a few strips of bear jerky left and a few handfuls of oats for the horses. We needed to eat and we needed to restock our potions. As it was, all I would be able to do for Lambert’s burn was to cool it with snow.
I sent Lambert to the dung hill to dispose of the troll heads. Not that I consider myself a genius in negotiation, but Lambert’s fury definitely wasn’t helping.
My negotiation wasn’t helping either. You can’t take what people don’t have. The village elder told me how bad the winter had been, how sick their children were, how many people they had buried. He made grand promises of our payment come harvest time, but those wouldn’t fill anyone’s belly now.
I was sad more than anything when I stepped outside. It was a terrible time for everyone. Lambert was back already, fiddling with Roach’s saddle bags. Maybe he had checked if I had any healing supplies. I’d have to think of something to do for his arm. If I had looked properly before blasting the sign, he wouldn’t have been injured.
We walked from the elder’s house through the main square while I told Lambert about my lack of success.
“Thief!”
In the moment it took me to locate the shout to a short woman wielding a ladle, people streamed from all sides onto the small square. Soon, we were surrounded by a tightly packed mass of men, women.
“Stay calm,” I whispered to Lambert, too low for human ears to hear.
“We should definitely make a run for it,” he whispered back.
“You’ll hurt someone if you ride through this crowd,” I hissed urgently. “We’ll clear this up and we’ll be on our way.”
“Very bad idea.”
In hindsight, it seems obvious, but at the time, I did not pick up what he was saying.
A string of sausages was discovered in my saddle bags.
I would have liked to pretend that I didn’t know how they had gotten there, but by this point it dawned on me. I couldn’t even really blame Lambert. We were hungry. We deserved payment for killing those trolls. And if it wasn’t given freely, then why not take it? Because these people were also hungry. Because it was against the law. But so was swindling people out of their payment. Only that we didn’t count as people.
“Whose horse is this?” the elder asked.
Since I was holding her reins, I saw no point in denying it. “She’s mine.”
“Thief,” he spat. “You dare steal from hard-working, honest people?”
“You dare steal from hard-working witchers?” Lambert shouted across him.
“Let me handle this,” I hissed at him.
“My apologies,” I said to the elder. “But we do deserve payment for the trolls.”
“You deserve nothing.” He was furious, spittle spraying from his mouth. “You would have gotten your payment. Instead, you turn to thievery. You steal the food from our babes’ mouths!”
The crowd grew restless. Hands twitched towards knives. We could take them, obviously, but we were so close to Kaer Morhen, we couldn’t afford a massacre here.
“Feed these to your children.” I pointed at the sausages. “And accept my apologies. I will not happen again.”
But the crowd was baying for blood. Our blood. Or anybody’s blood. They’d suffered so much over the past months and finally their anger had found a convenient outlet, a scapegoat.
“Not enough,” the elder said. “You’ll be punished for your crime.”
“Fuck’s sake, Geralt,” Lambert whispered. “Let’s go. You can’t let them do this.”
“And let them take out their anger on Vesemir and Eskel next week?” I hissed back. “No, we’ll finish this now.”
“If we spur the horses through them and each focus on one side, I’m sure we can—”
“What is the punishment?” I asked out loud, cutting off Lambert’s protests.
“Lashes.” The elder leered at me. Around him, the crowd cheered.
“How many?”
“However many it takes to make the message sink in.”
“Geralt, no!”
I looked straight at Lambert. “I’ll give these people their justice.”
“It wasn’t even you. Stop it. Who knows how many this man thinks are adequate!”
“He’s not strong enough to give me many. I can take it.”
I could certainly take it better than Lambert. I wasn’t well-nourished by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t injured and certainly in much better shape than him.
They tied me to the back of a cart, arms spread wide, bare back exposed. The excited crowd jostled for space, each eager to get the best view of this. Had to give the people what they wanted. Bread and games. And if there wasn’t enough of one, there had to be more of the other.
I breathed deeply, falling into a sort of meditation. I would accept their punishment, yes, but I wouldn’t show them any weakness.
I had only made one miscalculation. The elder didn’t give me the lashes. His son did. A strapping lad who did not look starved in the least. And he certainly had no trouble wielding that whip.
One.
That wasn’t just a whip. It was a cat of many tails. It broke skin immediately and blood trickled down my back.
Two.
The crowd cheered. This wasn’t bread, but it sure was the next best thing to see someone else suffer.
Three.
The excitement of the crowd spurred on the man wielding the whip and the following strokes came faster.
Four. Five. Six.
My back was by now a mess of blood and torn skin. I let myself sink deeper into my meditation.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
I would not give them the satisfaction of voicing my pain. They may be entertained by watching me suffer, but they wouldn’t have the joy of hearing me cry out.
The continuing counting became a background hum in my mind. I let the pain fade away as well. There had to be knots in each of the tails for them to cut me so quickly. I hadn’t expected that. I had thought in a small village like this they’d have a regular bullwhip and nothing especially set aside for punishments.
Clearly, whippings were nothing unusual in this place.
I concentrated on my breathing rather than the pain or the numbers. I never did find out how many lashes I received that day. When they finished, my back was burning and blood had by now run all the way down into my boots.
Lambert cut me loose as soon as the last lash had fallen.
My arms fell uselessly to my side, utterly numb. I must have been in that position for a while to lose feeling in them so completely.
Lambert stood in front of me when I turned around, shielding me from the villagers.
“There you have your justice.” He bared his teeth at them. “May you choke at it.”
The crowd parted. While they were still flinging insults at us, it seemed like we were free to go now. I certainly did not want to linger in this place a moment longer.
The world swam in front of my eyes when I took the first step towards Roach. The fire in my back burned with renewed fury.
I should see to these wounds, wash them and dress them properly. But we couldn’t stay here. So I grabbed my shirt and my armour. Lifting my arms made something tear further than it already had, opening another part of my flesh up to the icy air.
I could feel the weave of my shirt in great detail when I put it on and every single thread of it hurt. Tightening my armour over it certainly didn’t make anything feel better, but maybe pressure would at least keep the wounds from bleeding so much.
Mounting Roach was very nearly too much. My vision went black for a moment. I clung onto her mane and was thankful that she followed Lambert without any input from me.
Once we had left the village behind, I straightened up in the saddle and groaned wretchedly.
“I’m sorry Geralt, I…” Lambert genuinely looked it.
“Guess I should be happy you’re not a particularly practiced thief.”
“Geralt, this was my punishment. I should never…”
“I might have done it myself if I’d thought of it.” It was a lie and we both knew it, but it served no purpose for both of us to be miserable. “Cheer up. It’s over now. Let’s put as many miles between us and this place as we can.”
I spurred Roach on, as much to get away from his questions as to leave the village behind. It was difficult to focus on sounding normal and not like I felt every single lash with every step of my horse.