The Witcher

THE SWORD OF DESTINY I

He discovered the first body around noon.

The sight of the dead rarely shook the witcher. His gaze passed over most of them with perfect indifference. But not this time.

The boy was fifteen. He lay on his back, legs wide apart; something, on his lips, was frozen, like a grimace of terror. Geralt knew nonetheless that the child had died on the spot, that he had not suffered, that he probably didn't even see death coming. The arrow had pierced his eye and penetrated deep into the skull through the eyesocket. The fletching consisted of tiger-pheasant feathers, painted yellow and jutting above the grass.

Geralt looked around himself quickly. He found what was looking for without difficulty: a second arrow, identical, stuck in the trunk of a pine tree, about six steps back. He understood what had happened. The child had not heeded the warning: frightened by the whistle and the impact of the arrow, he had taken off running in the wrong direction. The side that the arrow told him not to go, to turn around. The lightning hiss and the poison pen, the brief impact of the point that bit into the wood. “Human! Not another step!” That was the declaration of the whistle and the impact. “Human! Begone! Go quickly from Brokilone. You have conquered the entire world, human, you have left your mark everywhere, you peddle everything in the name of modernity, an era of change, what you call progress. But we want neither you nor your progress. We don't want any of your changes. We want nothing that you bring with you.” Whistle, impact. “Out of Brokilone!”

Human, out of Brokilone, thought the witcher. Even if you are fifteen, crossing the forest, driven by fear, without knowing your way. Even if you are seventy, forced to gather firewood, because your infirmity has warranted that you be chased from the cottage and deprived of food. Even if you are six, drawn by the flowers that bloom in the sun-drenched clearing. Out of Brokilone! Whistling, impact.

In the past, he thought, before shooting to kill, they gave two warnings. Three, even.

In the past, he thought, continuing on his way. In the past.

Progress...

The forest did not seem to warrant such a sinister aura. It was, in fact, terribly wild and impenetrable, but this was nothing out of the ordinary in the depths of a forest where each shaft of light, each touch of sun that the leaves and branches of the large trees allowed to filter through, was immediately exploited by dozens of young birch, alder and hornbeam, by brambles, ferns and junipers, covering with their shoots a land of brittle wood, of dry branches and rotted trunks, remains of the oldest trees at the end of their battle and their life. 

There was not the heavy, ominous silence ordinarily associated with the places where these things dominated. On the contrary, Brokilone was alive. Buzzing insects, lizards rustling underfoot, beetles shining in rainbow colors, thousands of spiders crawling on canvases where droplets sparkled, woodpeckers striving against the trunks, jays chattering.

Brokilone was alive.

But the witcher could not allow himself to be complacent. He knew where he was and did not forget the boy with the pierced eye. Among the mosses and pine needles, he sometimes saw bleached bones stripped by carnivorous ants.

He continued on his way – cautiously, but swiftly. The tracks were fresh. He thought he could make the capture, stop, and return to the people that he served. He thought, despite everything, he was not too late.

Wrongly.

He would not have noticed the second body without the reflection of the sun on the sword that the dead man clutched in his hand. He was a grown man. The simplicity of his dark gray garments revealed a humble origin. With the exception of blood stains blooming from two arrows planted in his chest, his clothing was clean and new: he was not, then, a simple valet.

Geralt looked around him and found the third corpse, dressed in a leather jacket and a green tunic. The ground around the body was entirely trampled, the moss and the needles stamped down into the dirt. There could be no doubt: this man had suffered at length.

He heard a groan.

Quickly, he parted the juniper branches and saw the deep hole that they had concealed. In the hollow, a man of strong constitution was lying on the exposed roots of a pine. His hair was black, like his beard, contrasting with the terrible, even deathly pallor of his face. His light deerskin doublet was red with blood.

The witcher vaulted into the hole. The wounded man opened his eyes.

“Geralt...” he moaned. “Oh gods... I must be dreaming...”

“Freixenet?” said the witcher, surprised. “You're here?”

“I... ah...”

“Don't move.” Geralt knelt next to him. “Where are you hurt? I don't see the arrow...”

“It went clean through. I broke the tip, then I took it out... Listen, Geralt...”

“Shut up,” Geralt said, “because you're losing all your blood. You have a pierced lung. I need to get you out of here, damn it! What the devil were you doing in Brokilone? This is dryad territory, their sanctuary; no-one leaves alive. Don't you know that?”

“Later...” Freixenet moaned. He spat blood. “Later, I'll explain... Now, get me out of here... Ah! Damn it! Gently... ah...”

“I can't.” Geralt stood, looking around. “You're too heavy...”

“Leave me,” the wounded man muttered. “Leave me, it's a shame... But save her... By all the gods, save her...”

“Who?”

“The princess... ah... Find her, Geralt...”

“Keep quiet, by all the devils! I'll find something to pull you out of there.”

Freixenet coughed loudly and spat again; a dense stream of blood fell from his beard.

The witcher swore. He leapt out of the hole and examined his surroundings. Needing two young trees, he went to the edge of the clearing where he had noticed an alder.

Whistle, impact.

Geralt froze. The arrow shot into the trunk at head-height was fletched with a hawk feather. He looked in the direction indicated by the shaft; he knew where it was fired from.

About fifty paces away there was another hole, a tree stump lifting its tangle of roots into the sky and still clinging to an enormous mass of sandy soil. Further on, there was a massive blackthorn and the darkness was striped by the light bands of the trunks of birch trees. He saw no-one. He knew he would see nothing.

He raised both hands in the air, very gently.

“Ceádmil! Va an Eithné meáth e Duén Canell! Esseá Gwynbleidd!”

He heard the muffled rustling of a bowstring, then saw an arrow shot deliberately for him that he could, this time, locate: right in the sky. He lifted his gaze, stopped in his tracks and tumbled to aside. Geralt froze. The arrow was planted almost vertically in the moss, two steps from him. Almost instantly, a second arrow joined the first at an identical angle. He feared that he would never see the flight of the third.

“Meáth Eithné! ” he repeated. “Esseá Gwynbleidd!”

“Gláeddyv vort!”

A voice like a whisper of wind responded. A voice, not an arrow. He was alive.

Gently, the witcher loosened the buckle of his belt and removed his sword, holding it far from his body and then tossing it to the ground. The second dryad emerged without a sound from behind the trunk of a tree surrounded by junipers, less than ten paces from him. Although she was petite and slender, the trunk seemed thinner still. Geralt did not understand how he could have failed to notice her arrival. Her garment – a harlequin fabric combining a number of shades of green and brown, in leaves and scraps of bark, but not at all detracting from the grace of her body – had effectively camouflaged her. Her hair, tied back by a black scarf at her brow, was olive-colored, and stripes painted with walnut ink streaked her face.

More to the point, the dryad was drawing her bow and taking aim.

“Eithné!” he cried.

“Tháess aep!”

He was silent, docile, unmoving, hands held away from his body. The dryad did not lower her weapon.

“Dunca! ” she cried. “Braenn! Caemm vort!”

The one that had fired on him appeared from the blackthorn and crossed the tree stump, jumping deftly across the hole. Despite the mass of dried branches, he heard none c***k beneath her feet. He felt behind him a slight rustle, like the sound of a leaf carried by the wind. He knew that the third dryad stood behind him.

One of them picked up Geralt's sword in a movement like lightning. She had hair the color of honey, tied back with a headband of rushes. A quiver filled with arrows hung on her back.

The one that was the farthest away, near the hole, was fast approaching. Her clothing was indistinguishable from that of her companions. She covered her dusky brick-colored hair in a braided crown of clover and heather. Her bow remained lowered, but an arrow was already nocked.

“T'en thesse in meáth aep Eithné llev?” she asked, coming very close.

Her voice was extraordinarily melodic; her eyes were enormous and black.

“Ess' Gwynbleidd?”

“Aé... aesselá...” he stammered. But the words of the Brokiloneon dialect that sang from the mouths of the dryads could not escape from his mouth and were bruised by his lips.

“Does one of you speak the common tongue? I don't know much...”

“An' váill. Vort llinge, ” she cut in.

“I am Gwynbleidd, the White Wolf. Madame Eithné knows me. I have business with her. I have lived before in Brokilone. In Duén Canell.”

“Gywnbleidd. ”

The one with brick-red hair blinked her eyes.

“Vatt'ghern?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “The witcher.” 

The olive-haired one restrained her anger and lowered her bow. The one with brickred hair watched Geralt with large eyes; her green-tinted face remained completely motionless, dead, as if she were a statue. That immobility did not allow him to judge the beauty of her features; the thought stumbled on her indifference, insensitivity, and even cruelty. Geralt silently reproached himself for his poor judgment in seeing false humanity in this dryad. He should have known that she was simply older than the two others. Despite their appearances, she was actually much, much older.

Silence hung over their indecision. Geralt heard Freixenet moaning, groaning, coughing. The one with brick-red hair had also heard, but her face remained impassive. The witcher put his hands on his hips.

“There, in the hole,” he said calmly, “is an injured man. Without help, he will die.”

“Tháess aep!”

The olive-haired one drew her bow, directing the tip of the arrow directly at Geralt's face.

“You want to let him die?” he continued, without raising his voice. “To choke gradually on his own blood, so simply? In that case, it would be better to finish him.”

“Shut up,” the dryad barked, using the common tongue.

Even so, she lowered her weapon and released the tension of the string. She turned to the second with an inquisitive look. The one with brick-red hair nodded, indicating the hole beneath the tree stump. The olive-haired one ran to it, quickly, without a sound.

“I want to see Madame Eithné,” Geralt repeated. “I'm on a mission...”

Indicating the honey-haired one, the eldest said:

“She will lead you to Duén Canell. Go.”

“Frei... and the wounded man?”

The dryad looked at him, blinking her eyes. She continued to toy with the nocked arrow.

“Nevermind that,” she replied. “Go. She will take you.”

“But...”

“Va' en vort!” she said curtly, her lips thinning.

Geralt shrugged his shoulders and turned to the honey-haired one. She seemed to him to be the youngest of the three, but he could be mistaken. He noticed the blue of her eyes.

“Let's go.”

“Very well,” the honey-haired one responded. After a moment of hesitation, she returned his sword. “Let's go.”

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Shut up.”

She made off quickly through the heart of the forest without giving him a glance. It was an effort for Geralt to follow her. The dryad was trying – deliberately, Geralt knew – to make the man she was guiding collapse finally into the brush, complaining, exhausted, unable to continue. Too young to know that he was a witcher, she was unaware that she was not dealing with a human.

The girl – Geralt understood that she was not a born dryad – stopped suddenly and turned. He saw her breasts heaving beneath her dappled garment; she was trying with difficulty not to pant.

“Shall we slow down?” he suggested with a smile.

“Yeá.” She gave him a grudging look. “Aeén esseáth Sidh?”

“No, I'm not an elf. What's your name?”

“Braenn,” she replied, resuming the journey a little more steadily, without any intention of losing him.

They walked together then, one beside the other. Geralt caught the scent of her sweat: 159

the ordinary perspiration of an ordinary girl. The sweat of dryads recalled the smell of crushed willow branches.

“And what were you called before?”

She fixed her eyes on his. Her lips drew back suddenly. He thought that she would get angry or order him to shut up. She did neither.

“I don't remember,” she responded, hesitating.

He thought she was lying.

She didn't appear to be more than sixteen years old and could not have lived in Brokilone for more than six or seven years: if she had been taken in earlier, even as a small child or a newborn, he would not be able to recognize her as a human. Blues eyes and fair hair could also occur among the dryads. Dryad children, conceived in celebrated encounters with elves or humans, only inherited the natural qualities of their mothers and could only be born as daughters. It was exceedingly rare, and in general only in later generations, that a child was born with the eyes or the hair of an anonymous male ancestor. Geralt was nevertheless sure that Braenn did not possess a drop of dryad blood. That was of no great importance. By birth or not, she was now well and truly one of them.

“And you?” She watched him with suspicion. “What is your name?”

“Gywnbleidd.”

She nodded.

“Well then... Gwynbleidd.”

They moved more slowly than before, but always with a certain velocity. Braenn, it was obvious, knew Brokilone well. If he had been alone, the witcher would not be able to maintain such a pace and remain on course. Braenn quickly reached the edge of the forest; she followed the winding and hidden paths, crossed ravines at an agile run across the fallen logs that served as bridges, waded bravely into the glossy expanses of marshes green with duckweed that the witcher had never dared to cross on his own, losing many hours or even days to get around them.

Braenn's presence alone did not protect Geralt from the wilderness. There were places where the dryad slowed her pace, advancing very carefully, feeling the ground, taking the witcher by the hand. He understood why: the pitfalls of Brokilone were legendary. There was talk of spiked pits, arrow traps, falling trees, the terrible “hedgehog”: a ball bristling with spines that was attached to a rope and fell unexpectedly, clearing all in its path. There were also places where Braenn stopped and whistled melodiously. Whistles then answered her from the brush. There were places, too, where she stopped, her hand resting on an arrow in her quiver, ushering Geralt into silence and waiting, tensely, for the source of sounds in distant thickets.

They had to make camp despite the efficiency of their pace. Braenn invariably chose a place at a height where gusts of hot air regulated the temperature. They slept on dried ferns, very close to one another: a dryad custom. In the middle of the night, Braenn snuggled tightly against him. Nothing more. He took her in his arms. Nothing more. She was a dryad. It was only for warmth.

They resumed their journey at dawn, when it was still nearly dark.