Auberon Muircetach did not rise from his seat, though his eyes finally lifted from the middle distance to settle, cool and appraising, on the general standing before him. "Report, then," he said, as though the fires licking at his own city's skyline were of no more consequence than a late spring rain.
"The intruder is human," Eredin said, keeping his voice level. "A witcher, by every sign of it.. and no ordinary one. He commands fire the way our own kind commands the currents of magic, as though it were bone and breath to him rather than sorcery borrowed and shaped. He has already cut through two full detachments of my Red Riders, and reduced Iorlath's bridge-ward to ash along with the mage who held it." A muscle worked faintly in his jaw. "He is here for the girl, Your Majesty. There can be no other reason a man such as that would tear his way into our world at all."
Something flickered, briefly, behind the king's eyes. "A witcher," he repeated, as though testing the shape of the word. "How curious. I had thought that particular breed of hunter confined to lesser concerns in that world.. drowners, and griffins.. And all manners of filth that exist there."
"This one, it seems, has found a greater concern, she was raised in a keep of witchers after all." Eredin said. He allowed the silence that followed to stretch a moment longer than courtesy required before he pressed forward. "Your Majesty, if I may speak plainly.. why has the girl not already been secured? She stands within your own walls, under your own roof, and this.." he gestured faintly toward the smoke-stained sky beyond the garden's warded hedges, "..this is precisely the sort of chaos that makes plain what waits for us should we continue to delay. She is here. Now. This is our chance to see the matter settled once and for all, before any further complication finds its way to our door."
Auberon was quiet for a long moment, his gaze drifting back out over his garden, over blossoms that glowed faintly blue in the dark, as though the answer he sought lay somewhere among them rather than in himself. "You mistake my patience for hesitation, Eredin," he said at last. "I have played the doting host to that child for two days now. I have offered her flowers, and gentle words, and the promise of a throne beside my own. and do you know, General, that every hour of it has been among the hardest labor I have undertaken in centuries?" His mouth twisted, something bitter and old surfacing beneath the composed mask he wore so well. "I have hated humanity since before your father's drew his first breath. I watched what they did to Lara Dorren, and I have carried that hatred every day since as faithfully as I carry my own crown. To sit across from one of them, to smile, to court one, as though six centuries of grief could simply be set aside for the sake of expedience.." He shook his head slowly. "I do not know that I can bring myself to finish what courtship implies, Eredin. Not truly. Not with one of them."
'Fool,' Eredin thought, and kept the thought entirely behind the smooth, sympathetic stillness of his face. 'Six hundred years of waiting, and now, at the very threshold of everything we have bled for, he baulks over the taste of his own hatred, I despise them too yet I understand what must be done..'
Aloud, he said only, "Your Majesty's grief does you honor. No one among us doubts the depth of what you carry." He reached into the folds of his cloak and drew out a small, dark vial, its glass etched with fine runes, and held it out across the space between them with both hands. "Which is precisely why I have taken the liberty of preparing this. An aphrodisiac, my king, old craft, older than either of us, drawn from the deep archives before the White Frost claimed half of the worlds of what our ancestors once knew. It will see the matter through without requiring you to summon feelings you no longer possess, nor pretend at tenderness you cannot honestly give her." His voice dropped, urgent now, stripped of its earlier smoothness. "You know as well as I do, as well as every soul in this palace who still remembers why we came to be what we are, what hangs in the balance. The gates, Your Majesty. The way home for our people, the salvation of a dying world, all of it rests on Elder Blood taking root once more in a child born of your line. We cannot allow hundreds years of patient waiting to fail, over one witcher's inconvenient arrival, or over grief you have carried long enough to have earned the right to set down."
The king's fingers closed slowly around the vial, and for a long moment he simply looked at it, turning it once in the pale garden light. "And the intruder," he said finally, not looking up. "What do you intend to do with him?"
Eredin's smile returned, cold and certain. "I intend to kill him myself, Your Majesty. Personally. It would be my honor." He inclined his head, already turning to go. "Leave the witcher to me. See only that the girl is dealt with, before this night is through, your majesty."
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Ciri slammed both palms against the shimmering barrier and vanished a flicker of green light, gone and reappeared a stride closer to the ward's edge only to meet the same unyielding wall, the blink-step collapsing her forward motion into nothing more than a jarring halt against magic that simply would not part for her.
She staggered back, breathing hard, staring at the barrier with something between fury and disbelief. "Damn it." She struck it again, this time with her fist rather than her power, and it held exactly as before. "So much for the Lady of Time and Space! I can't even cross one bloody barrier!" She pressed her palm flat against the surface, it was not merely a ward, but something woven with knowledge of her specifically, of the very nature of her power, built to smother it rather than simply block it. Avallac'h's work. He'd know exactly how to cage the thing he'd spent a lifetime studying.
She turned in a slow circle, scanning the chamber for anything.. a window, a seam in the stonework, some flaw in the ward's casting and found nothing. Only stone, and silk, and the light sealing her in like a bird in a gilded cage.
The distant sound of fighting rolled up again through the palace's depths, closer now, sharper, and Ciri's head snapped toward it. "Geralt," she said. "He found a way in.. This is him.. this is all him." Her jaw tightened. "He can't fight them all alone. He'll die down there!" Her hands curled into fists at her sides. "I have to help him.."
She closed her eyes, forcing her breathing to slow, forcing the frantic, useless fury coursing through her to settle 'calm down.. focus. You've done this before... pulled yourself through worse than this.' She thought of Kaer Morhen, of Vesemir's steady voice walking her through every failed jump until her power finally obeyed her instead of the other way around. She thought of Geralt, somewhere below her, fighting for her sake in a world that had no reason to show him any mercy at all.
When she opened her eyes again, they burned bright, brilliant green, twin points of light in the dim chamber and the air around her began to shake, the ward's light flickering, straining, as something vast and ancient answered her call from somewhere deep within her own soul. She raised both hands, and with a single, violent burst of raw, silver-green power, the barrier shattered outward in a shower of dying light and Ciri was gone, blinked away into nothing, leaving only scorched, cracked stone where the ward had stood only a moment before.
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Geralt found him in the palace's inner hall, standing alone amid a wide, empty chamber lined with tall, silver-veined columns a figure in black armor edged with frost-pale filigree, tall and broad-shouldered, a longsword resting easy in one gauntleted hand. As Geralt entered, the figure reached up and settled a skull helm over his face, hollow eyes fixing on the Witcher across the length of the hall.
"So there were two of you." Eredin's voice carried strange and resonant from behind the mask. "Ah. You must be the White Wolf. Her father." He tilted his head slightly, studying Geralt with interest. "I've heard a great deal about you, Witcher."
Geralt stood in the chamber's entrance, breathing harder than he'd have liked to admit, blood from a dozen shallow cuts drying dark against his armor, the toll of Caranthir's relentless spellwork still burning through every muscle. He raised his silver blade regardless, steady despite the exhaustion behind it, and fixed his golden eyes on the armored figure before him. "Get out of my way."
"I'm afraid that isn't possible." Eredin rolled his shoulders once, settling his grip more firmly around his sword's hilt, and took a slow step forward, boots ringing against the stone. "Though I confess, your presence here has served my purposes rather well tonight, Witcher. For that, you have my genuine thanks." The hollow eyes of his helm seemed to gleam faintly in the low light. "But you will die here all the same."
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