Lille entered the glade.
She was no longer a skinny peasant girl in a sackcloth dress. Through the grasses covering the glade walked—no, not walked—floated a queen, radiant, golden-haired, fiery-eyed, ravishing. The Queen of the Fields, decorated with garlands of flowers, ears of corn, bunches of herbs.
At her left-hand side, a young stag pattered on stiff legs, at her right rustled an enormous hedgehog.
“Dana Meadbh,” said Filavandrel with veneration. And then bowed and knelt.
The remaining elves also knelt; slowly, reluctantly, they fell to their knees one after the other and bowed their heads low in veneration. Toruviel was the last to kneel.
“Hael, Dana Meadbh,” repeated Filavandrel.
Lille didn't answer. She stopped several paces short of the elf and swept her blue eyes over Dandilion and Geralt. Torque, while bowing, started cutting through the knots. None of the Seidhe moved.
Lille stood in front of Filavandrel. She didn't say anything, didn't make the slightest sound, but the witcher saw the changes on the elf's face, sensed the aura surrounding them and was in no doubt they were communicating. The devil suddenly pulled at his sleeve.
“Your friend,” he bleated quietly, “has decided to faint. Right on time. What shall we do?”
“Slap him across the face a couple of times.”
“With pleasure.”
Filavandrel got up from his knees. At his command, the elves fell to saddling the horses as quick as lightning.
“Come with us, Dana Meadbh,” said the white-haired elf. “We need you. Don't abandon us, Eternal One. Don't deprive us of your love. We'll die without it.”
Lille slowly shook her head and indicated east, the direction of the mountains. The elf bowed, crumpling the ornate reins of his white-maned mount in his hands.
Dandilion walked up, pale and dumbfounded, supported by the sylvan. Lille looked at him and smiled. She looked into the witcher's eyes. She looked long. She didn't say a word. Words weren't necessary.
Most of the elves were already in their saddles when Filavandrel and Toruviel approached. Geralt looked into the elf's black eyes, visible above the bandages.
“Toruviel…” he said. And didn't finish.
The elf nodded. From her saddlebow, she took a lute, a marvelous instrument of light, tastefully inlaid wood with a slender, engraved neck. Without a word, she handed the lute to Dandilion. The poet accepted the instrument and smiled. Also without a word, but his eyes said a great deal.
“Farewell, strange human,” Filavandrel said quietly to Geralt. “You're right. Words aren't necessary. They won't change anything.”
Geralt remained silent.
“After some consideration,” added the Seidhe, “I’ve come to the conclusion that you were right. When you pitied us. So goodbye. Goodbye until we meet again, on the day when we descend into the valleys to die honorably. We'll look out for you then, Toruviel and I. Don't let us down.”
For a long time, they looked at each other in silence. And then the witcher answered briefly and simply:
“I’ll try.”
VII
“By the gods, Geralt.” Dandilion stopped playing, hugged the lute and touched it with his cheek. “This wood sings on its own! These strings are alive! What wonderful tonality! Bloody hell, a couple of kicks and a bit of fear is a pretty low price to pay for such a superb lute. I’d have let myself be kicked from dawn to dusk if I’d known what I was going to get. Geralt? Are you listening to me at all?”
“It's difficult not to hear you two.” Geralt raised his head from the book and glanced at the sylvan, who was still stubbornly squeaking on a peculiar set of pipes made from reeds of various lengths. “I hear you; the whole neighborhood hears you.”
“Duvvelsheyss, not neighborhood.” Torque put his pipes aside. “A desert, that's what it is. A wilderness. A shit-hole. Eh, I miss my hemp!”
“He misses his hemp,” laughed Dandilion, carefully turning the delicately engraved lute pegs. “You should have sat in the thicket quiet as a dormouse instead of scaring girls, destroying dykes and sullying the well. I think you're going to be more careful now and give up your tricks, eh, Torque?”
“I like tricks,” declared the sylvan, baring his teeth. “And I can't imagine life without them. But have it your way. I promise to be more careful on new territory. I’ll be more restrained.”
The night was cloudy and windy. The gale beat down the reeds and rustled in the branches of the bushes surrounding their camp. Dandilion threw some dry twigs into the fire. Torque wriggled around on his makeshift bed, swiping mosquitoes away with his tail. A fish leapt in the lake with a splash.
“I’ll describe our whole expedition to the edge of the world in a ballad,” declared Dandilion. “And I’ll describe you in it, too, Torque.”
“Don't think you'll get away with it,” growled the sylvan. “I’ll write a ballad too, then, and describe you, but in such a way as you won't be able to show your face in decent company for twelve years. So watch out!
Geralt?”
“What?”
“Have you read anything interesting in that book which you so disgracefully wheedled out of those freemen?”
“I have.”
“So read it to us, before the fire burns out.”
“Yes, yes”—Dandilion strummed the melodious strings of Toruviel's lute—“read us something, Geralt.”
The witcher leaned on his elbow, edging the volume closer to the fire.
“‘Glimpsed she may be,’” he began, “‘during the time of sumor, from the days of Mai and Juyn to the days of October, but most oft this haps on the Feste of the Scythe, which ancients would call Lammas. She revealeth herself as the Fairhaired Ladie, in flowers all, and all that liveth followeth her path and clingeth to her, as one, plant or beast. Hence her name is Lyfia. Ancients call her Danamebi and venerate her greatly. Even the Bearded, albeit in mountains not on fields they dwell, respect and call her Bloemenmagde.’”
“Danamebi,” muttered Dandilion. “Dana Meadbh, the Lady of the Fields.”
“‘Whence Lyfia treads the earth blossometh and bringeth forth, and abundantly doth each creature breed, such is her might. All nations to her offer sacrifice of harvest in vain hope their field not another's will by Lyfia visited be. Because it is also said that there cometh a day at end when Lyfia will come to settle among that tribe which above all others will rise, but these be mere womenfolk tales. Because, forsooth, the wise do say that Lyfia loveth but One land and that which groweth on it and liveth alike, with no difference, be it the smallest of common apple trees or the most wretched of insects, and all nations are no more to her than that thinnest of trees because, forsooth, they too will be gone and new, different tribes will follow. But Lyfia eternal is, was and ever shall be until the end of time.’”
“Until the end of time!” sang the troubadour and strummed his lute. Torque joined in with a high trill on his reed pipes. “Hail, Lady of the Fields! For the harvest, for the flowers in Dol Blathanna, but also for the hide of the undersigned, which you saved from being riddled with arrows. Do you know what? I’m going to tell you something.” He stopped playing, hugged the lute like a child and grew sad. “I don't think I’ll mention the elves and the difficulties they've got to struggle with, in the ballad. There'd be no shortage of scum wanting to go into the mountains…Why hasten the—” The troubadour grew silent.
“Go on, finish,” said Torque bitterly. “You wanted to say: hasten what can't be avoided. The inevitable.”
“Let's not talk about it,” interrupted Geralt. “Why talk about it? Words aren't necessary. Follow Lille's example.”
“She spoke to the elf telepathically,” muttered the bard. “I sensed it. I’m right, aren't I, Geralt? After all, you can sense communication like that. Did you understand what…what she was getting across to the elf?”
“Some of it.”
“What was she talking about?”
“Hope. That th
ings renew themselves, and won't stop doing so.”
“Is that all?”
“That was enough.”
“Hmm…Geralt? Lille lives in the village, among people Do you think that—”
“—that she'll stay with them? Here, in Dol Blathanna? Maybe. If…”
“If what?”
“If people prove worthy of it. If the edge of the world remains the edge of the world. If we respect the boundaries. But enough of this talk, boys. Time to sleep.”
“True. It's nearly midnight; the fire's burning out. I’ll sit up for a little while yet. I’ve always found it easiest to invent rhymes beside a dying fire. And I need a title for my ballad. A nice title.”
“Maybe The Edge of the World?”
“Banal,” snorted the poet. “Even if it really is the edge, it's got to be described differently. Metaphorically. I take it you know what a metaphor is, Geralt? Hmm…Let me think…‘Where…’ Bloody hell. ‘Where—’”
“Goodnight,” said the devil.
THE VOICE OF REASON
6
The witcher unlaced his shirt and peeled the wet linen from his neck. It was very warm in the cave, hot, even, the air hung heavy and moist, the humidity condensing in droplets on the moss-covered boulders and basalt blocks of the walls.
Plants were everywhere. They grew out of beds hewn into the bedrock and filled with peat, in enormous chests, troughs and flowerpots. They climbed up rocks, up wooden trellises and stakes. Geralt examined them with interest, recognizing some rare specimens—those which made up the ingredients of a witcher's medicines and elixirs, magical philters and a sorcerer's decoctions, and others, even rarer, whose qualities he could only guess at. Some he didn't know at all, or hadn't even heard of. He saw stretches of star-leafed melilote, compact balls of puffheads pouring out of huge flowerpots, shoots of arenaria strewn with berries as red as blood. He recognized the meaty, thickly veined leaves of fastaim, the crimson-golden ovals of measure-me-nots and the dark arrows of sawcuts. He noticed pinnated pondblood moss huddled against stone blocks, the glistening tubers of raven's eye and the tiger-striped petals of the mouse-tail orchid.
In the shady part of the grotto bulged caps of the se-want mushroom, gray as stones in a field. Not far from them grew reachcluster, an antidote to every known toxin and venom. The modest yellow-gray brushes peering from chests deeply sunken into the ground revealed scarix, a root with powerful and universal medicinal qualities.
The center of the cave was taken up by aqueous plants. Geralt saw vats full of hornwort and turtle duckweed, and tanks covered in a compact skin of liverwort, fodder for the parasitic giant oyster. Glass reservoirs full of gnarled rhizomes of the hallucinogenic bitip, slender, dark-green cryptocorines and clusters of nematodes. Muddy, silted troughs were breeding grounds for innumerable phycomycetes, algae, molds and swamp lichen.
Nenneke, rolling up the sleeves of her priestess's robe, took a pair of scissors and a little bone rake from her basket and got to work. Geralt sat on a bench between shafts of light falling through huge crystal blocks in the cave's vault.
The priestess muttered and hummed under her breath, deftly plunging her hands into the thicket of leaves and shoots, snipping with her scissors and filling the basket with bunches of weeds. She adjusted the stakes and frames supporting the plants and, now and again, turned the soil with her small rake. Sometimes, muttering angrily, she pulled out dried or rotted stalks, threw them into the humus containers as food for mushrooms and other squamous and snake-like twisted plants which the witcher didn't recognize. He wasn't even sure they were plants at all—it seemed to him the glistening rhizomes moved a little, stretching their hair-like offshoots toward the priestess's hands.
It was warm. Very warm.
“Geralt?”
“Yes?” He fought off an overwhelming sleepiness. Nenneke, playing with her scissors, was looking at him from behind the huge pinnated leaves of sand-spurry flybush.
“Don't leave yet. Stay. A few more days.”
“No, Nenneke. It's time for me to be on my way.”
“Why the hurry? You don't have to worry about Here-ward. And let that vagabond Dandilion go and break his neck on his own. Stay, Geralt.”
“No, Nenneke.”
The priestess snipped with scissors. “Are you in such haste to leave the temple because you're afraid that she'll find you here?”
“Yes,” he admitted reluctantly. “You've guessed.”
“It wasn't exactly difficult,” she muttered. “But don't worry. Yennefer's already been here. Two months ago. She won't be back in a hurry, because we quarreled. No, not because of you. She didn't ask about you.”
“She didn't ask?”
“That's where it hurts,” the priestess laughed. “You're egocentric, like all men. There's nothing worse than a lack of interest, is there? Than indifference? No, but don't lose heart. I know Yennefer only too well. She didn't ask anything, but she did look around attentively, looking for signs of you. And she's mighty furious at you, that I did feel.”
“What did you quarrel about?”
“Nothing that would interest you.”
“I know anyway.”
“I don't think so,” said Nenneke calmly, adjusting the stakes. “You know her very superficially. As, incidentally, she knows you. It's quite typical of the relationship which binds you, or did bind you. Both parties aren't capable of anything other than a strongly emotional evaluation of the consequences, while ignoring the causes.”
“She came looking for a cure,” he remarked coldly. “That's what you quarreled about, admit it.”
“I won't admit anything.”
The witcher got up and stood in full light under one of the crystal sheets in the grotto's vault.
“Come here a minute, Nenneke. Take a look at this.” He unknotted a secret pocket in his belt, dug out a tiny bundle, a miniature purse made of goat-leather, and poured the contents into his palm.
“Two diamonds, a ruby, three pretty nephrites, and an interesting agate.” Nenneke was knowledgeable about everything. “How much did they cost you?”
“Two and a half thousand Temeria orens. Payment for the Wyzim striga.”
“For a torn neck.” The priestess grimaced. “Oh, well, it's a question of price. But you did well to turn cash into these trinkets. The oren is weak and the cost of stones in Wyzim isn't high; it's too near to the dwarves’ mines in Mahakam. If you sell those in Novigrad, you'll get at least five hundred Novigrad crowns, and the crown, at present, stands at six and a half orens and is going up.”
“I’d like you to take them.”
“For safekeeping?”
“No. Keep the nephrites for the temple as, shall we say, my offering to the goddess Melitele. And the remaining stones…are for her. For Yennefer. Give them to her when she comes to visit you again, which will no doubt be soon.”
Nenneke looked him straight in the eyes.
“I wouldn't do this if I were you. You'll make her even more furious, if that's possible, believe me. Leave everything as it is, because you're no longer in a position to mend anything or make anything better. Running away from her, you behaved…well, let's say, in a manner not particularly worthy of a mature man. By trying to wipe away your guilt with precious stones, you'll behave like a very, very over-mature man. I really don't know what sort of man I can stand less.”
“She was too possessive,” he muttered, turning away his face. “I couldn't stand it. She treated me like—”
“Stop it,” she said sharply. “Don't cry on my shoulder. I’m not your mother, and I won't be your confidante either. I don't give a shit how she treated you and I care even less how you treated her. And I don't intend to be a go-between or give these stupid jewels to her. If you want to be a fool, do it without using me as an intermediary.”
“You misunderstand. I’m not thinking of appeasing or bribing her. But I do owe her something, and the treatment she wants to undergo is apparently very costly. I want t
o help her, that's all.”
“You're more of an idiot than I thought.” Nenneke picked up the basket from the ground. “A costly treatment? Help? Geralt, these jewels of yours are, to her, knickknacks not worth spitting on. Do you know how much Yennefer can earn for getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy for a great lady?”
“I do happen to know. And that she earns even more for curing infertility. It's a shame she can't help herself in that respect. That's why she's seeking help from others—like you.”
“No one can help her; it's impossible. She's a sorceress. Like most female magicians, her ovaries are atrophied and it's irreversible. She'll never be able to have children.”
“Not all sorceresses are handicapped in this respect. I know something about that, and you do, too.”
Nenneke closed her eyes. “Yes, I do.”
“Something can't be a rule if there are exceptions to it. And please don't give me any banal untruths about exceptions proving the rule. Tell me something about exceptions as such.”
“Only one thing,” she said coldly, “can be said about exceptions. They exist. Nothing more. But Yennefer…Well, unfortunately, she isn't an exception. At least not as regards the handicap we're talking about. In other respects it's hard to find a greater exception than her.”
“Sorcerers”—Geralt wasn't put off by Nenneke's coldness, or her allusion—“have raised the dead. I know of proven cases. And it seems to me that raising the dead is harder than reversing the atrophy of any organs.”
“You're mistaken. Because I don't know of one single, proven, fully successful case of reversing atrophy or regenerating endocrine glands. Geralt, that's enough. This is beginning to sound like a consultation. You don't know anything about these things. I do. And if I tell you that Yennefer has paid for certain gifts by losing others, then that's how it is.”
“If it's so clear, then I don't understand why she keeps on trying to—”
“You understand very little,” interrupted the priestess. “Bloody little. Stop worrying about Yennefer's complaints and think about your own. Your body was also subjected to changes which are irreversible. She surprises you, but what about you? It ought to be clear to you too, that you're never going to be human, but you still keep trying to be one. Making human mistakes. Mistakes a witcher shouldn't be making.”