Chapter Text
PROLOGUE — THE PULL
It happened to all three of them at the same instant, and none of them was standing still.
Arthur Morgan was at a full gallop. Rain in his face, the mare foaming, Dutch shouting something behind him about the wagon and about faith, always about faith. Arthur had just twisted in the saddle to fire back over his shoulder when the world simply let go of him. No bang, no light. It was like stepping off a stair you were sure was there.
Jin Sakai was in the air. Halfway through a leap off the burning roof of a Mongol camp, katana already clearing the scabbard, the scream of the man below him starting and never finishing. The heat of the fire vanished mid-jump. That was what he noticed first: the heat going away.
And V was jacked in. Cable in the back of her neck, fingers locked on the terminal, two Militech guards coming down the corridor and Johnny Silverhand yelling in her ear about how this plan was garbage and she was going to die again, and then he was going to say “you hearing me, V?”, he always said—
And then he didn’t.
The silence came before the fall. V felt the silence first. Twenty years of noise, Night City never shuts up, and even when it did there was Johnny, there was the construct, there was that cynical presence taking up space behind her eyes like a tenant who never paid rent.
Gone.
And she dropped to her knees on wet cobblestones, in an alley that stank of river mud and piss, with her HUD blinking in the corner of her vision:
CONNECTION LOST
SEARCHING FOR NETWORK…
SEARCHING FOR NETWORK…
SEARCHING FOR NETWORK…
It never stopped searching again.
It took all three of them a few hours to notice the same strange thing: the words were getting through. Not properly. They arrived half a second late, as if someone invisible were translating everything too slowly, in the wrong order, with an accent from nowhere. Arthur figured it was the fever. Jin thought it was a kami mocking him. V assumed it was an implanted translator she didn’t remember buying, and spent a good few minutes trying to switch off something that didn’t exist.
None of them was in the same place. None of them knew the other two existed.
All three of them had landed in a world that decided to welcome them the same way: by showing them what it does to the weak.
I. JIN — THE VINE HILLS
The mud was different from the mud of Tsushima. Richer. Warmer. It smelled faintly of crushed fruit. Jin Sakai crouched and rubbed a handful of it between his fingers for far too long, because it was the only thing in that place he understood.
Everything else was wrong. The hills were striped with low green rows, vines, thousands of them, combed across the land like someone had brushed its hair. The houses were white stone with red tile roofs, neat, clean, painted, flowers in the windows. Castles with blue-tipped towers stood on the ridges like ornaments on a shelf. It looked like a scroll painting of a country that had never known war.
And there was no sea. He walked half a day looking for the smell of the ocean and found none.
He found the village at the end of the afternoon, and he found the three men with it.
They wore metal, decent plate over good cloth, and a baron’s colors on their tabards: a golden beast on blue that Jin did not recognize. One of them held a rope. At the end of the rope, an old man knelt in what had probably once been a vegetable garden. Two women were being held by the second man. A boy was crying inside the house, loudly, the way children cry when nobody has told them to be quiet because nobody is left to tell them.
Jin stopped at the edge of the village and watched.
He knew this scene. It was the same thing. Change the armor, change the banner, change the language, change the pretty white houses, and it was exactly the same thing. Armed men and unarmed people. The distance between those two groups is the only thing that never changes from world to world.
What he did was take the scabbard from his belt and strike its tip against the wooden gate. Three times. Slowly.
The men turned. They laughed.
They laughed at his helmet, laughed at the mask, laughed at the lacquered cords of his armor, laughed because he looked like a red-and-gold beetle crawled out of a story told to frighten children.
“Get lost, clown,” said the one with the rope.
“Let the old man go,” said Jin.
The silence afterward lasted long enough for Jin to understand that they had understood. Good. That was enough.
“Drop the rope, take up your sword and come,” he went on. “Come with both hands. I will wait.”
And he waited.
This is the thing nobody in Tsushima ever managed to explain properly, not the Mongols, not the peasants, not his own uncle. Jin Sakai did not offer the duel because he thought it was beautiful. He offered it because he could no longer live with the alternative.
He had poisoned men. He had cut throats in the dark, burned men in their sleep, become a story mothers told their children so they would stay inside at night. He had done all of it to save people, and it had worked, and still, every time he closed his eyes, he knew he had traded something for something and never read the price properly.
So now he did this. He gave the chance. Every time, to everyone, even to the worst man in the world: you may defend yourself. Because on the day he stopped giving that chance, he would become just another armed man in a village of unarmed people, and the only difference between him and those three would be the pattern on the cloth.
Injustice, for Jin, was never death. He was a samurai. Death was scenery.
Injustice was death with no possible answer. It was the strong using their strength on those who could not strike back. To steal someone’s life is grave; to steal someone’s chance to fight for their own life is the real theft, the one that can never be returned.
The three came at once, which was cowardice, but they did not know it was.
Jin cut the first one on the diagonal, shoulder to hip, before the man finished his third step. Shifted his feet, turned aside the second blow with the flat of the blade, let the man’s weight work against him, and opened his neck on the return. Two seconds. Perhaps three.
The third, the youngest, stood frozen with his sword shaking in his hand, a sour smell rising off him.
Jin lowered the katana.
“Go,” he said.
The boy in the baron’s colors ran and did not look back once.
Afterward, Jin knelt in front of the old man and cut the rope carefully, the way you cut a rope near someone’s throat: slowly, blade turned outward, saying what he was about to do before he did it. He helped the man up. He bowed.
And then he stood in the middle of the village, dirty with the blood of men he did not know, in a land where not even the mud smelled right, and had the strangest thought of his life:
I do not know where I am. But I know exactly what I am here.
It was almost a relief.
He did not know that the boy he had spared was, at that moment, running toward the city. That by nightfall the boy would be telling anyone who would listen about a spirit in red armor who stood in the road and called armed men out by name. That within the week, a bailiff in Beauclair would put a very large number of crowns on the spirit’s head.
He would not have minded. He had been a ghost before.
II. ARTHUR — THE DUCAL ROAD
The mare was all right. Arthur checked that before he checked himself, which said a good deal about the man.
Only then did he notice the road. Too wide to be a trail, too well kept to be anything he knew: paved in places, lined with little stone shrines to some lady in a lake, flanked by vineyards so tidy they looked combed. No railroad anywhere. No telegraph pole, no wire, no smokestack on the horizon. Arthur spent a solid forty minutes trying to find west by the sun and concluding that either the sun was wrong or he was.
Then he coughed. That cough. The one that came up from the bottom, the one that made him lean on the saddle horn and wait for it to pass.
“Well,” he told the mare. “At least that came along.”
He found the farm late in the afternoon, and he found the trouble with it.
A cart. Four men. One of them mounted, in a fine cloak, with the face of a man who had never carried anything heavier than his own opinion. The other three were hauling sacks of grain out of a barn while a husband and wife watched. The woman held her husband’s arm. The husband stood with his hands open, the way a man stands when he’s already figured out that arguing is going to cost him dear.
“It is the baron’s share of the duke’s levy,” the one in the fine cloak was saying, pleasantly, like a man discussing the weather. “By decree. If you’re short on grain, you’ll send your daughter up to the manor to work off the difference, and we’ll settle up after the harvest. All very civilized.”
Arthur sighed. A long sigh, a tired man’s sigh.
He didn’t like it. Not the scene. The scene he almost liked, in that awful way you like recognizing old acquaintances. What he didn’t like was knowing, with a dull and ancient certainty, exactly how this was going to end.
He climbed down off his horse and walked over. Slowly. Hands away from his holster, hat low.
“Afternoon,” he said.
Four heads turned.
“Listen,” Arthur began, in the most reasonable tone he owned, and he owned a very good reasonable tone; he was a man who could talk when he wanted to. “I don’t know where y’all are from and y’all clearly don’t know where I’m from, so let’s take this slow. That grain there is these folks’ winter. You take it, they die. That ain’t a threat, it’s arithmetic.”
Silence.
“I got this here.” He pulled a handful of coins and a gold chain from his pocket. Gold is gold in any world; it’s the only language that translates itself. “Take it. It’s worth more than the grain, a whole lot more. Tell your boss you got paid in metal. Everybody sleeps sound tonight.”
The one in the fine cloak looked at the gold. Looked at Arthur’s coat, his hat, the revolver at his hip, that strange thing that was his gun, and did the sum men like him always do: four against one.
“I’ll take the gold and the grain,” he said. “And your horse.”
Arthur closed his eyes for a second.
“Fine,” he said. “Then this here’s the second part of the conversation. I’m gonna say it real plain, ’cause I don’t want nobody claiming later they weren’t warned. You mount up, you ride on, and I forget your face. I’m gonna count to three. A smart man starts walking on ‘one.’”
The youngest of the three grain-haulers dropped his sack and started walking on “one.”
The other two drew steel on “two.”
There was no “three.”
Arthur’s revolver made a sound that world had never heard, and the sound did more damage than the bullets: one of the men dropped before he was even hit, from pure fright. Two shots, two bodies. The one in the fine cloak put his spurs to his horse and tore off down the road, and Arthur let him. Let him on purpose. He raised the revolver, drew a bead on the man’s back, held it there three seconds, and lowered it.
Because killing doesn’t give anything back. That was the thing Arthur Morgan had learned late and paid dear for.
He had killed a lot of people. He had robbed people who had nothing. He had walked into other folks’ homes and broken whatever there was to break, and called it work, and slept fine. And then one day he watched his own family, the only one he’d ever had, made of thieves and broken people and Dutch, get taken apart piece by piece by men in suits with the law on their side, and none of it was personal, and all of it was for money. For a handful of dollars. You could add up the price.
Injustice, to Arthur, was that: folks with too much power grinding down folks with none and calling the process a “decree,” a “levy,” a “share.” Cruelty never introduces itself as cruelty. It comes with paperwork. In this place, it apparently came with a smile and a lot of talk about chivalry.
And he knew, knew full well, that he himself had once been the man with the cart. That didn’t make him any cleaner. It just made him quicker to recognize it.
He holstered the gun and turned to the couple, who were frozen stiff.
“Sorry about the noise,” he said, a little awkward, taking off his hat.
He spent the rest of the afternoon there. Fixed the barn door the men had kicked in. Put the grain back where it belonged, sack by sack, coughing between them. Went through the bodies and left whatever he found, coins, a knife, a good buckle, on the kitchen table without a word. Split enough firewood for a week, because it was the only useful thing he could think to do with his hands.
The little girl of the house, maybe eight, watched him the whole time from the corner.
Arthur didn’t know how to talk to children. Never had. He waved once, crooked, and went back to the wood.
Before he left, he sat on a stump and opened his journal. Drew the barn. Wrote underneath, in his slanted hand:
“Don’t know what place this is. Folks that get beat on here get beat on just the same. Pretty country, though. Fixed a door. Ain’t much. It’s what I had.”
Because he knew two shots didn’t undo anything. The pain of the ones left behind doesn’t go away because the guilty one did. Arthur never had any illusions about that. He just had the stubborn conviction that since you couldn’t undo it, you could at least leave folks a little better off than you found them. A fixed door. Firewood. A few coins. It ain’t much.
It’s what he had.
The farmer watched him ride off, and that night he told his wife he was fairly sure they’d been visited by a demon. A polite one, but a demon: a sick man who spat thunder from his hand and then mended the fence. By the end of the month, the farmer would decide he needed to know whether the thunder-demon was coming back. He would scrape together the only payment he had, three good laying hens, and go looking for someone whose trade was knowing about demons.
III. V — THE LOWER DOCKS
V hated that city within four minutes, which was a personal record, because it had taken her six years to hate Night City properly.
It wasn’t the stink down by the river. She was from Night City; the stink was almost nostalgic. It wasn’t even the city itself, which was, she had to admit, stupidly beautiful: white towers, blue roofs, a palace that looked like it was made of cake frosting, fountains everywhere, flowers in every window. It was the absence of everything. No net. No grid. No holo, no ad, no signal, no door that opened on its own. Her HUD kept searching, like a dog waiting for a dead owner. The implants worked: the optics still zoomed, the reflexes were still juiced, the pistol still had fourteen rounds and she had already decided each one was worth more than any life around here. But nothing talked to anything.
And the pretty made it worse. Night City had taught her one thing above all: the prettier the facade, the uglier the basement. So she went looking for the basement, and found it where it always is, down by the water, behind the warehouses, where the white stone turned grey and the flowers stopped.
And Johnny wasn’t there.
She tested it fifteen times or so. Talked out loud in the alley, needled him, cursed him. “C’mon, Silverhand, say something dumb. Anything dumb.” Nothing. That space behind her eyes where there used to be a dead, unbearable man was just… space.
She had spent months wanting him to shut up. Now it was like waking up without an arm and still feeling the arm.
That was the mood she was in when she turned the corner and saw it.
A big guy, with a club and a gold tooth, standing over a beggar with one leg. The beggar had already handed over his purse. V saw that from a distance: the purse was already in the guy’s hand. Done. Transaction complete.
The guy didn’t leave.
He pulled off the old man’s boot. Then the other one. Then he started pushing the old man’s face into the puddle with his foot, slowly, performing, glancing back over his shoulder at an audience of six people who were laughing. Made the old man beg. Made the old man say thank you. Made the old man lick the boot.
V stood still and felt something very specific rise in her.
She is not a good person. She knows it and doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise. In Night City, V had walked into buildings and taken from people whatever there was to take. Theft is theft, it’s work, it’s how the city breathes. Corp robs corp, merc robs corp, gang robs gang, and everyone who dies in that loop chose to be in the loop. Picked up a gun, took the contract, sat down at the table. Flatlined? Collateral. Operating cost. It’s business, and business has rules.
But business has rules.
Rule number one: you take what you came for and you walk.
What that guy was doing wasn’t a robbery. The robbery had ended thirty seconds ago. This was a man discovering there was someone in the world weaker than him and deciding to charge interest in humiliation. And V came from a meat grinder, from the cruelest place the species has ever built, and even there this would count as waste. You don’t humiliate the mark. Humiliation doesn’t pay. Humiliation is a hobby.
It offended V on an almost professional level.
She crossed the street.
The guy saw her coming and smiled, because she was smaller than him. He raised the club.
V caught his wrist in midair with one hand, the servos in her arm giving off a faint hum nobody there could identify, and squeezed until she heard it crack. The club fell. She caught the club before it hit the ground. Kicked his knee out sideways, and he went down into the same puddle the old man was in.
And she didn’t kill him.
That matters.
“Look up,” V said, with a horrible calm. “No, look at me. There.”
She took the purse out of his pocket and tossed it into the beggar’s lap. Took the old man’s boots out of his hand and gave them back. Took the guy’s belt, his coat, his ring, a knife hidden in his boot, and handed it all out to the six people in the audience, who had been laughing thirty seconds earlier and were now very, very quiet.
“You had a job,” she said. “Take the money and vanish. That’s the gig. That’s acceptable, that’s how the world works, I don’t care about the old man, I don’t even know the old man.”
She crouched beside him.
“But you wanted more. You wanted him to know he’s nothing. That wasn’t on the invoice, choom. You billed that on the side.” She tilted her head. “Rule of business: you charge interest that wasn’t yours, you pay it back. With adjustment.”
And she made him beg. Made him say thank you. Made him crawl to the end of the alley in front of everyone, barefoot, his broken wrist swinging, while those same six people watched.
She didn’t lay another finger on him after that. She didn’t need to. She had taken the only thing he had and the only thing he valued, which was the version of himself that lived in his neighbors’ heads. By tomorrow the whole waterfront would know. He’d stay alive to hear it.
That was the payment.
Injustice, for V, has always had a name and a market value. She died because of a chip. She got shot in the head and dumped in a landfill because a rich family needed to reorganize its inheritance, and nobody ever apologized, and nobody ever will. It was collateral. It was a cost. And she accepted it the way you accept weather, because fighting the weather is gonk behavior.
What she doesn’t accept, what she has never accepted, is the extra part. The free-gift humiliation. The smile on the guy in the suit while he explains you’re not a person, you’re a line in a spreadsheet. Killing is business. Mockery is free. And V charges a lot for free things.
She stood, wiped her hand on her pants and looked at her HUD.
SEARCHING FOR NETWORK…
“Yeah,” she said to nobody. “Me too.”
By nightfall the dockhands were telling each other about the woman who broke a man’s wrist with one hand, as easily as snapping a breadstick. Nobody knew where she’d gone. Somebody said she’d walked out of the city toward the Sansretour Valley. Somebody else said she’d simply vanished. Both were closer to the truth than they knew.
IV. THE CROOKED VINE
Anyone who walks a road long enough ends up at the same inn. That’s true in every world.
This one was called the Crooked Vine, a two-story stone place with a painted sign at a crossroads in the Sansretour Valley, where three roads met and all three of them smelled of wine.
Arthur got there first, because he had a horse. He tied the mare, walked in, took off his hat out of habit, and the whole common room did that half-second of silence it does when a stranger in the wrong coat walks in. He sat in a corner with his back to the wall — always back to the wall — and asked for coffee.
Nobody knew what coffee was.
He ended up with a mug of something brown and lukewarm that tasted like wet bread. Drank it anyway. Paid with an American silver dollar that the innkeeper turned over and over in his hand with a frown, bit, and finally accepted because silver is silver.
Jin arrived an hour later, and that silence lasted a good deal longer.
He had taken off his helmet, at least. But the armor was still the armor: red lacquer, braided cords, overlapping plates like scales, work no smith on that continent would have the faintest idea where to start on. And the sword. The curved sword, with the smooth scabbard and the round guard, and the way he rested it while he sat, always on the left, always edge-up.
He bowed to the innkeeper. The innkeeper didn’t know what to do and bowed back, half crouched, all wrong.
Jin sat. Asked for water. Tasted the wine that came with it by mistake, and the face he made was the face of a man who had drunk sake all his life and had just discovered a brand-new injustice.
V came in last and didn’t sit. She leaned against the wall by the door for fifteen minutes first, because that’s what a merc does in a new place: reads the room before walking into it.
And it was while reading the room that she clocked it.
It wasn’t the clothes. Weird clothes she could explain: big world, strange people, some far-off country. It was three things, and she ran through them in her head like someone checking a contract.
One. The guy in the hat paid with a coin the innkeeper bit. Nobody bites their own kingdom’s money. Nobody needs to test cash they recognize.
Two. The guy in the red armor asked for water, and when the innkeeper set it down with a “Lady of the Lake keep you, sir”, the guy went still half a second too long. That half-second. The half-second when you realize you were supposed to know what that means and you don’t.
Three, and this one closed the deal: both of them kept looking at the door. Not the paranoid look of someone with enemies. The look of someone who got dropped somewhere suddenly and still doesn’t know where that door leads. V knew that look because she’d been wearing it since she fell into that alley.
She was going to say something. She didn’t get the chance.
Because that was the moment a drunk knight-errant in the middle of the room, one of those Toussaint knights sworn to five noble virtues and currently practicing none of them, decided the serving girl was going to sit on his lap, and when she said no he grabbed her wrist, knocked the tray over, and announced, loudly, for everyone to hear, because the loud part was the point, that she ought to be grateful for the attention of a man of the sword.
And the whole room laughed, the way no room should laugh.
What happened next happened all at once, and V would remember it for the rest of her life.
Jin stood first. He didn’t run. He pushed his chair back with his foot, took three steps, and stood two meters from the knight with his sword still sheathed, left hand on the grip, thumb resting on the guard.
“Let go of her wrist,” he said. “Then stand. Then draw your sword. I will wait.”
Arthur stood second. He was already on his feet, mug in hand, and he spoke over Jin’s shoulder in the tone of a man haggling over cattle:
“Or,” he said, “we do it like this. I pay for your drinks all night, you let the lady go, you get on your horse, and tomorrow you tell your friends some sick old fella paid your tab and you rode off rich. That’s the best version of this story for you.” He set the mug down on the table with a click. “I’m gonna count to three, son.”
And V didn’t even stand up, because she was already standing.
She came from behind. Pinned the knight’s thumb, twisted it outward, and he let go of the girl’s wrist instantly with a high, thin squeal that didn’t match his size at all. She picked up his wine and poured it over his head, slowly, wine running down his beard, taking her time, looking him in the eyes the whole while.
“Loud,” she said. “You said it loud so everyone could hear, right? So say it loud again. ‘Sorry.’ To her, not to me. And kneel, ’cause you like an audience.”
The room went dead silent.
Jin turned his head slowly and looked at V. Arthur, over in the corner, scratched his beard and made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a cough.
The knight looked at the three of them. One offering an honest duel. One offering money and a countdown. One holding his thumb in a position that strongly suggested there were bones in there.
He apologized. On his knees. Loudly.
Then he slunk out and didn’t come back.
The three of them ended up at the same table, and it was V who pulled out the chair and sat without asking, because that is very much a V thing to do.
“Okay,” she said. “You two fell out of the sky too.”
Arthur raised an eyebrow.
“Come again?”
“You paid with a coin the guy bit.” V pointed with her chin. “He didn’t know it. And you didn’t ask the price before you paid, you just shoved metal on the table and hoped.” She turned to Jin. “And you froze when he blessed you in the name of some lake lady. Half a second. I saw it.”
Jin said nothing. But his shoulders came down a little, and that was an answer.
“And you both watch the door like I do.” V leaned back. “Not the look of somebody with enemies. The look of somebody who doesn’t know which way the rest of the world is.”
Arthur looked at Jin. Jin looked at Arthur. It was a long look.
“I was on horseback,” Arthur said at last, slowly. “Raining. And then I wasn’t.”
“I was in the air,” said Jin. “In the middle of a leap. The fire vanished before I landed.”
V was quiet a while.
“I had somebody in my head,” she said. “An asshole. Never stopped talking.” She turned her mug on the table. “I spent months wanting him to shut up. Then he did. And it’s the quietest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Neither of them asked what she meant, which she thought was very polite of them.
“You did three different things,” she said after a moment. “With that guy. Everybody else here would’ve done one thing, and that thing is nothing. You two and me, we did three different things at the same time. Nobody from this world has three answers ready for that.”
“I gave him the chance to defend himself,” said Jin. “If I take that from him, I become him.”
“I gave him the chance to leave,” said Arthur, shrugging. “Killing him don’t give her wrist back. Just makes noise and a mess. But if he insists, conversation’s over, and a bullet ends things quick.” He coughed into his fist. “And after, you help the girl pick up her tray, ’cause that’s what you can do.”
The two of them looked at V.
She shrugged.
“He humiliated her loud. So he paid loud.” A sip. “Where I come from, people die all the time and it’s almost always business. Fine, it’s business. But business has rules. You take what you came for and you vanish. The second you stop to make somebody feel smaller for free, you’re not working anymore, you’re having fun.” She put both elbows on the table. “And then I bill you.”
Arthur looked at her a while.
“You know it’s near about the same thing, right?” he said. “All three.”
“It is not,” said Jin.
“Nope,” said V.
“It is,” said Arthur, and coughed, and smiled out of one side of his mouth. “It’s three doors into the same room. You two just came in whichever way you could.”
They sat quiet a while. Outside, it began to rain on a world that belonged to none of them, with a rain smell that wasn’t right for any of them.
V looked at the corner of her vision. The text was still there, stubborn, blinking slowly.
SEARCHING FOR NETWORK…
She found that funny. For the first time in a long while, the silence behind her eyes didn’t feel empty. There were two voices at the table.
“Okay,” V said, pushing her mug into the middle. “Rules of business, then. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know how to get back, and this place is a meat grinder just like mine, only with swords, prettier houses and no electricity.” She looked at the two of them. “Anybody here got a better plan than ‘head west and deal with the problems as they show up’?”
Jin put his hand on the hilt of his katana and inclined his head, once.
Arthur picked his hat up off the table, put it on, and stood with the groan of a man who had seen too much.
“West’ll do,” he said. “Always has.”
EPILOGUE — THE NOTICEBOARD
Three days later and two villages over, a man with white hair and two swords on his back stopped in front of a noticeboard in a village square and read.
It was the usual. A drowner in someone’s well. A lost goat. A lady of good family seeking a discreet escort to Castel Ravello. And then, pinned one above the other, three things that were not usual at all.
The first was written in a farmer’s shaky hand on the back of a feed sack:
SEEKING A WITCHER. Demon come to our farm on the ducal road. Spits thunder from his hand. Killed two of the baron’s men. Then mended our fence and split our wood and left coin on the table. Want to know is he coming back. Can pay three good laying hens.
The second was on proper parchment, with a wax seal:
BY ORDER OF THE BAILIFF OF BEAUCLAIR. A reward of TEN THOUSAND CROWNS for the capture or destruction of a SPIRIT IN RED ARMOR that has been seen upon the roads of the vine hills, and that challenges armed men aloud, by name, to single combat. Three men of the Baron de Peyracq-Peyran slain. Approach with caution. Do not accept its challenge.
The third wasn’t a notice at all. Someone had just scratched it into the wood of the board with a knife, under the other two, the way people write things they can’t prove:
Woman on the lower docks broke Remi Twotooth’s arm with one hand like a breadstick. Made him crawl. Not a mage. Nobody knows what she is. Went toward Sansretour.
The witcher read all three twice.
Then he took a map out of his saddlebag and looked at it for a long time. The ducal road. The vine hills. The lower docks. Three different places, three different stories, three different kinds of wrong. And three trails, every one of them, bending toward the same crossroads in the Sansretour Valley.
“Hmm,” said Geralt of Rivia.
He had taken strange contracts before. Most monsters, in his experience, turned out to be something else once you got close. Usually they turned out to be people. Sometimes the people turned out to be the monsters.
He had never before had the feeling he had now, standing in that square, which was that the three things on this board might just be lost.
He took down the feed-sack notice first, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
Hens were honest payment.
Then he mounted his horse and rode toward Sansretour, not knowing he was riding toward the beginning of a very full house.