A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

(Frederick's note: After that last revelation Kerrass had to take a bit of time and got up for a wander. I can't say that I blame him as that can't have been easy to say. I made some further notes on some of the things said and waited for him to get back)

I don't want you to think of us as evil though. I really feel as though I might have done those other Cat Witchers a disservice there. Master Nayhan in particular was a good man who cared about the apprentices under his charge. He cared about us. He's one of the few Witchers who I've ever seen actively tear up when the news that some Witcher or another died somewhere out on the path.

I once saw another feline Witcher stand his ground before a dozen bandits who were trying to get to the family that were hiding behind him. He took two arrows to his chest before I could reach him and he still fought on until he eventually died of his wounds. His name was Barret.

Another Witcher friend of mine protected travelling group of pilgrims. He took his payment in a fair and equal share of their food, actively turning down the extra food that they tried to give him and often handing out his spare food to the starving children that gradually became attached to the travelling pilgrims. His name was Aiden.

I have many stories like these.

I know of a Witcher named Folkin who went into a battlefield to exterminate and drive off some Necromorphs for a nearby village. He found that one of the soldiers was still alive but was dying of massive infection from having been left in the mud and the dirt. The soldier asked Folkin to carry a letter and a necklace off to his widow and to give him a quick death. There was no payment offered and none asked but the letter and the necklace were handed over to the woman directly after Folkin had taken the time to do some chores around the house.

.

What we did was evil. I will not say that it wasn't and some day, in the future, those deaths will come due and I will have to pay for them.

But the people who committed those crimes were everyday Witchers. It could have been me. It was me. I did those things and I don't think of myself as evil.

.

Does an evil man see himself as evil though?

I don't know which philosopher it was that said that we are all the heroes of our own story and I suppose he or she is right in that regard.

So why are Feline Witchers so different from others? Why were we so willing to murder other Witchers? Why do people see us as psychopaths?

The most obvious problem is that we are. It's something in the mutations that we undergo. The herbs, mushrooms and concoctions of the trial of the grasses accelerate and accentuate natural male feelings of aggression and violence during puberty which is one factor but the other thing is that....

This is a bit technical.

In changing the way the body works to make us faster and stronger and better healers it also means that it changes how we think and how we act. One of the stereotypes of Witcher is that we feel no emotion.

Do we not?

I'm not sure and I don't know how you could tell. Do I feel emotion or is what I feel an emotional equivalent that I have trained myself to feel so that I can interact with humans.

I don't know the answer to that and no one can seem to answer it with any kind of certainty.

But one of the side-effects of Feline mutations is that we become psychotic.

We all have it to one degree or another and trying to explain it to someone else is really rather difficult.

For myself I have this thing that kind of stops me from thinking. It's like a weight that settles on my shoulders and chest making it difficult to think or even to breathe. Everything becomes a huge and overwhelming effort that takes far too much energy and all I want to do is to find some hole in the middle of nowhere and crawl into it to die in the quiet and cool darkness that the hole contains.

I don't dare hunt when these moods are on me because it suddenly feels as though it would be so much easier to let the monster take me. So easy to just take a half step too far or just be a little bit slower with the parry or the strike. No-one would think less of me for it. They wouldn't know. I died at the hands of the creature that I was hired to fight. No-one would know the difference.

But I would.

These moods come on me without warning and I don't know what causes them and I don't know how to stop them. There is just the knowledge that the mood will pass eventually.

I also hear voices. I can't tell you anything more than that. Just sometimes, not always or even often, but sometimes I hear voices. It's like a scratch at the back of my brain that feels like I could just itch it, or if I I try really really hard that I might be able to hear what they're trying to say.

I don't scare easily, after all I'm a Witcher and I don't feel emotions.

Or so they say.

But those voices terrify me even though I can't hear them. How do you deal with that? How do you cope with those feelings or having to listen to those voices or that feeling that you aren't alone inside your own head?

Once again, all I can do is wait, in the sure knowledge that my brain will be my own again in just a few hours or days later. All I have to do is be calm, focus on my breathing and get through it.

Believe me when I say that I have it easy as well.

Here are some more anecdotes about other Cat Witchers.

Another friend of mine named Kenneth said that he was two people in the same body. One was the calm, quiet, relatively respectable Witcher. The other was a frothing madman, hard drinking, hard gambling, hard-loving lunatic. Sounds like a fun person to be right? Especially as it was obvious that the more passionate Kenneth was a better Fighter than the calm professional until one day Passionate Kenneth tried to force himself on a woman and killed three of the people who tried to stop him. Calm Kenneth managed to regain control and walked into the nearest monster nest.

Another man was so cold, so remote from those lives he saved, those people that he worked with that he... He had no sympathy for them, he had no empathy. Humans, elves, dwarves were just things to him. He once told me that people were like windmills. In the way that you pour grain into a windmill and you get flour out, he felt that you poured dead monsters in at the top and got money out the bottom. It was a simple transaction for him. Spectacular Witcher, the best I've ever seen. Was executed for murder because a man refused to pay him after the job was done. They got into a fight when the Witcher was determined to take goods in return for the work and the man died. I'm told that the Witcher went to the scaffold genuinely confused that people couldn't see that he had the right of the matter.

That's ignoring all the people that went howling insane, barking at the moon and eating their own faeces that had to be put out of their misery.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I can stand here and talk about how I'm feeling and what I can hear and I know it's not right and more importantly I know that eventually the problems will go away to come back later. But as I say. I am one of the lucky ones.

We have no words for what these....problems are other than to label them psychoses, put the label on the person, toss them into the madhouse and describe them as insane.

Another friend of mine has a defect in his brain that means that, in moments of stress, he can't tell the difference between a past event and a current event. Can you imagine that? How horrible that must be?

These things are not our fault, these things are things that were done to us by people who didn't know any better and who had those same things done to them.

What we did was wrong and I know that. I'm not trying to....

I'm not trying to excuse those actions, I'm trying to explain them.

All I can think of right now is how much I might have terrorised the readers that I'm speaking to.

Ah well. At the end of the day people will still need Witchers so I shouldn't worry too much about losing trade as a result of all of this.

The other explanation about our behaviour...

Remember I'm explaining rather than excusing.

The other explanation is that we didn't know any better.

This might sound like a cop out but it really is the case.

Master Nayhan was a good man and I will fight anyone who even tries to suggest that he wasn't. A deeply flawed example of the system and an enabler of that system as he went on but he cared about us. He really really did. He just wanted us to be better at our jobs and there is no doubt in my mind that even though I have learnt many things from many people over the course of the many years that I have been on the path but the reason that I am still alive today to continue my Witchers work is from what he taught me.

But what I was taught was that the only lives that mattered were other Cat Witchers.

Here is the thing and I think, no in fact I know, that this is the main reason that the other schools look down on us. All schools have thrown up worrying mutations in their history or have ended up killing more “subjects” than they have had survivors so that earlier reason is not a good enough reason as to why the Wolves and the Bears and the Griffins might have disliked us. The other reason was that we were taught not to value life. Not just monster lives, but also human, elf, dwarf, gnome, mutant, halfling or other. None of them mattered and if the chips were down then you should just kill them.

End of story.

This means that there is an interesting crossover. It is well known that we carry two swords. The incorrect answer to the question of “Why do you carry two swords?” is “One is for humans, the other is for monsters” but that's simply not the case. It is true for all Witcher schools that the philosophy is that both swords are for monsters. That is absolutely true and all Witchers say that.

This means that humans and elves and dwarves can be monsters too.

AND THIS IS PERFECTLY TRUE.

If you wish to argue against me here then I will point out the case of Lady Josefina that I understand Frederick has told people about. You can't say that humans can't be monsters if you've never seen the inside of a slave barge, or a surgeons tent on a battlefield.

You will never have had to hear the primal sound of a parent finding the corpse of a child after the pirates have raided the place, or the executioner for the Holy Flame openly fondling himself as he burns a pretty Sorceress.

You will never have spoken to a father who sold his daughter to sex traders because he knows that if she stays in the household he will have to pay a dowry and he justifies it to himself that at least this way she will have food in her belly rather than having to starve to death.

I've seen all of these and I bet many of you have seen similar.

The worst one I ever saw. A thing so bad that I couldn't contain myself was when a woman was on the road as part of a small wagon train. I think they were a family relocating or some other kind of affair and were travelling with a merchants wagon and some other families. This was about fifty to fifty five years ago now. The wagon train was caught by bandits. Everyone else just fled. Scattered and fled apart from this youngish woman. I think she was maybe 25-30, certainly old enough to have an eight year old kid. It turns out that the kid was being carried by the father, the woman's husband, but that meant that he couldn't keep up with the others so he dropped his kid.

This was bad enough but just you wait.

The woman saw this. Screamed at her husband and ran back to collect the child who had just sat down in tears. She reached the child, got him up and sent him after the others when it became obvious that the bandits would overtake them. In order to give her child time to escape she then threw herself at the nearest bandit, kitchen knife flashing. The next two bandits stopped to help their fellow and as such the child and other travellers could get away.

She was a pretty lady which I can attest to when she wasn't covered in blood and bruises and so the bandits decided to keep her alive.

At which point I enter the story. I was in the local area tracking down a Grave Hag that was terrorising the local populace. I was still trying to pin it down to find out where it's lair was when, almost by accident, I stumbled across this bandit's camp where the poor woman was staked out onto the ground while the members of the band were taking their turns with her.

It was exactly as horrific as you can imagine.

I did what I could, driving off her assailants before freeing her and making off with her as I wasn't able to kill all of the bandits so the chance of them coming back with friends was high. Locally there was a small shrine to Melitele where an oldish Priestess kept vigil. It was actually her that had hired me in the first place. I explained that I had found the poor woman and then I felt it best to let the professional get on with it although neither of us thought that the woman would survive for long as she was already badly wounded, malnourished and abused.

I returned to my job, kind of making a hobby of hunting the bandits as well when I could and I returned with my trophy to collect my pay to find that the young woman was both alive and actually thriving.

I was heading in the direction of where her new home was supposed to be so I offered myself as a willing escort and travelling companion figuring that I wanted to see the happy ending of the tale.

Every so often you need to see something good in the world to restore your faith that what you're doing has a good effect.

During the journey she talked, mostly because she didn't like the silence and I kept my peace and stayed well away from her, announcing my presence loudly whenever I was vaguely close to her, or she to me. I became proud of this woman. She stood tall and had been through the most horrific thing that a woman can go through and had come out the other end fighting, teeth bared and I liked that.

We got to her home and found her father, her husband and....

I still get angry when I think of this.

The husband had formally cast her off as dead and had already re-married.

Baring in mind that the poor woman had been gone for maybe a fortnight.

Her father had taken in the children before sending them off to a work-house because he didn't want anything to do with them. When the woman met the two men, who were chatting in the street. They spat at her. They called her a “spoiled woman” and that she should have had the good grace to die rather than...

and this is true...

bringing shame down on her family.

Now I'm a mutant. Our reputation for being emotionless is renowned. But that reaction stunned me rigid. It was a solid five minutes before I could react.

What did I do?

I took the poor woman to the temple of Melitele in the town. There were maybe four sisters and a priestess there and luckily they rose to the situation.

I then killed a pair of monsters.

I extracted the rough value of the woman's dowry, leaving the two widows with plenty (indeed the woman's mother rather agreed with me and tried to give me more money) which I gave to the priestesses of Melitele to hold in trust before I fled with the local guardsmen on my heels.

They wanted to execute me for murder.

In my eyes what I did was not murder. It was an extermination. It was a purging of the gene-pool. It was stopping the spread of evil as certainly the younger of the two men intended to breed further.

.

Incidentally, if you're ever wondering why I tend not to visit Kovir as much. That is the reason why.

Am I proud of that action?

Hell yes I am.

I'm not ashamed. I killed a pair of monsters it's my job.

But there is the problem isn't it. Who gets to decide who is a monster. For many Witchers they would argue that it is in their own, separate from the situation, point of view that gives them a unique insight into the problem. That is one of the reasons for the vaunted, famous and infamous Witcher neutrality that so many people talk about.

But then, who is truly separate from the situation. No-one exists on an island. No one can ever be truly neutral.

I've tried it. It's impossible. You can get close but my argument is that sometimes neutrality itself is a decision. It is a side to be picked and in not choosing you have still affected the situation.

It is an argument to be made that what the Cat Witchers did was to put down a hard and fast rule for their students that the person who gets to decide what a monster is is the client in question. Then the Witcher themselves can decide whether or not to take the contract. For after all that is their choice right?

Mmm, not really.

Believe me that when a Witcher is starving to death and living off acorn paste pancakes then he will take any job so long as it means that he doesn't have to boil his sword belt for soup.

We were told to take the contract. There is an old mercenary saying that a Contract is a Contract is a Contract. In that way we divest our responsibility for the murder or slaying or execution onto the client. I, the Witcher, am merely a weapon to be used by the client.

Just like any other weapon.

Unfortunately, other Witcher schools don't see it that way.

Even though, using that justification would mean that Witchers would still have work long after the final monster is slain, they see things in a way that their job is to protect people from the monster in the darkness.

Is that not what we were doing though?

.

I no longer know the answer.

I also don't know how much the difference between the Cat version of the Witcher code and the version practised by the other schools is as a result of those psychoses that I was talking about earlier, great or small.

But, an example...

The incident with Lady Josefina and the trolls.

A true Cat Witcher would have dealt with that incident vastly different. They would have looked at the corpse of Tom the troll. I would like to believe that they would have felt a little pity and buried the poor thing. What I said then about not showing cruelty was true, at least for me. We would then have met the town guard. Heard about the troll hunt. Followed up on that. Taken the Bitches money and killed Annie quickly and cleanly. If the Half-Elf had been a bit more clear about his problems with the girl and her suitor Billy the Ram. Then after taking their money, a Cat Witcher would have killed the pair of them without a second thought. Marched into town, demanded his reward before walking off.

Probably whistling as he went. Three monsters killed. Money in pocket.

No problem.

Contract fulfilled.

.

Simpler certainly.

But I would no longer be able to do that.

.

Sometimes I think it's a shame that there aren't as many Witchers around as there used to be. It would be really nice to be able to talk to some of them about this kind of thing. Unfortunately there simply aren't that many and most of the survivors tend to be the sort of dour, grim faced, taciturn men of legend who think that staying quiet makes them seem all mysterious.

They're mostly right as well unfortunately.

But I would love to be able to talk to someone about my doubts and fears. I would love to be able to consult someone who is older and more experienced. A Cat Witcher who can give me some guidance. But all of the old Cats are dead and those that survive have either managed to find a way off the path or are still struggling on with it to it's inevitable conclusion.

A flash of claws in the pitch darkness is you're wondering what that ending is.

You want to know what's changed in me. You want to know why I'm not as comfortable with the old Feline methods. Don't lie to me Fred I can see it in your eyes.

Yes there was a time when I would have dealt with Lady Josefina in the manner that I have just described. Same as there once was a time that Annie and her child would now be in graves next to her husbands or, more likely, left out to rot for the animals and the wind.

What can I say. I had my mind changed for me. I had my eyes opened and irony of ironies, the people that did that were the Wolves. The hated Wolves whose blood stains my sword and stains my soul.

Why did they save me?

They would say that it was their code that saved me. I don't know about that. I'm not a wolven Witcher. But I now look at them, those Wolven Witchers that I have met and I feel shame.

It was during a hunt like any other, maybe....forty years ago?

It's so hard to keep track nowadays.

Anyway, I was in Kaedwen and I was following a contract to hunt down a Big ass Royal Wyvern. Huge thing it was. Magnificent beast. The locals had already told me that she had been living up in the high hills for years, decades even without giving anyone any kind of problems. They didn't mind it taking the odd mountain goat or remote sheep. The village that hired me was miles from anywhere anyway and all they had to do whenever the local tax-man came by to count sheep was point to the Giant Wyvern that was flapping about relatively nearby and ask whether the tax-man himself wanted to argue with the giant beast about the stock numbers being smaller than they should have been.

But recently it seems that the Wyvern had become agitated. Aggressively attacking anything that had gone even remotely near what it saw as it's territory. That territory had also expanded and as a result, villagers and local peddler caravans were being preyed upon by the beast and as a result they hired a Witcher.

Me.

I did my job. I scouted around a bit, made sure that there weren't any young Wyverns who might account for the increased territorial nature of the beast. I rested up, took my potions, prepared my oils and went out for a hunt.

It was a hard fight but I had made a mistake. A really stupid, elementary mistake that makes me wince with remembered embarrassment even now.

The thing was that I had checked above ground for any competition to the Wyvern. What I hadn't checked for was the possibility of an underground challenge.

As we fought, the Wyvern and I, the ground began to collapse underneath us and we fell into a huge cavern. One of those magnificent places that reminds you of how small humanity really is. It was also the lair of a Kikkimore queen.

I was dazed, having been prepared for an above-ground fight I wasn't ready for an underground battle even though my training at the Feline keep soon came to my rescue. The thing about Kikkimore queens is that they are often surrounded by Soldiers.

The result was predictable.

The Wyvern gave as good as it got inside the short time that it survived before the combined forces of the Kikkimores overwhelmed them but by then I was fighting for my life and I did not succeed.

At some point I was pierced through the shoulder by a long claw that pinned me to the ground. Another claw pinned me through my leg, narrowly missing the major artery. The venom, which would already have been fatal to a human was clouding my vision and I could feel my body fighting it off but through that haze I could see the smaller workers coming towards me, mandibles twitching at the thought of fresh meat.

There are several instances where I have been close to death and that one was one of the closest.

But another man came into the cavern, wearing a red jacket of studded leather armour and wielding his silver sword expertly. He roared a challenge to distract the beasts from devouring me and charged into the middle of them.

Unlike me he was prepared to fight Kikkimores and proceeded to do so.

Very well.

Not that I knew this of course. I remember groaning as the claws came out of my leg and shoulder before I just passed out.

I woke up a couple of times over the following days to meet my rescuer. I had enough time to tell him about the village that had hired me and he told me briefly about the village that hired him.

The long and short of it was that he had been hired by a village on the other side of the mountains who had been concerned about the rumbles and problems of underground tunnelling. Bits of ground were collapsing. Sink-holes were forming and Kikkimores had been seen above ground. Not being stupid they had also hired a Witcher. The Kikkimore queen and the Wyvern were involved in a

territory war and both sets of humans had been caught in the middle.

It took me weeks to recover and by the time I had recovered the passes through to my normal winter hideouts had been closed. The Wolven Witcher whose name turned out to be Eskel, invited me to Kaer Morhen, home of the Wolf school.

I had no choice but to accept as I was still very weak and would not have survived living in the wilderness for the months of the winter. I just had to hope that they would not figure out who I was.

Turns out though that I was too late.

My memory of this is patchy as I was taking Witcher potions every hour on the hour to try and convince my tired body to heal itself. I would wake occasionally at which point Eskel would feed me as much food as I could stomach to give my metabolism the kick that it needed but then I would go back to sleep.

But I remember being wheeled into Kaer Morhen's outer courtyard which was the point where it finally dawned on me where I was and I started to panic. One younger Witcher came over to peer into the cart curiously.

“Evening scar-face, who's the mangy one?”

I would later find out that this one's name was Lambert. He's a fairly normal looking guy with a retreating widows peak which I always found a bit odd. He's a very difficult to like Witcher as he's a very angry man and he takes out his anger on anyone who's passing nearby by hurling insults at them. I've always suspected that he insults people more the more he likes them although the venom with which he does so never lessens. Having said that he seems a good man and he's a very dedicated Witcher.

I should also talk about Eskel briefly. He's the kind of man who, when you're not in his immediate presence, you remember as being larger and more heavily muscled than he actually is. He moves slowly and carefully when not fighting and speaks very little unless he starts drinking at which point he starts to open up. He's got this huge, livid scar down one side of his face that pulls his lip into an almost permanent sneer unless you can make him smile or laugh. He prefers hunting in the wilderness as he seems to prefer to keep his own company than that of others, hunting for isolated communities and such. He's also a consummate professional. In days when Witchers were still being created I imagine that Eskel would have been a perfect tutor for younger Witchers. His knowledge of monsters is vast.

I have very few good friends in this world. Eskel is one of them.

But anyway,

“Our hunts clashed,” Eskel replied to Lambert, encompassing a huge battle in three words. He's like that. “Kerrass here caught the worst.”

Lambert nodded looking down on me.

“It's been a while since we've had a pussy cat in these walls.”

Eskel shrugged.

“Vesemir won't like it,” Lambert went on. I remember wondering whether it was Vesemir who wouldn't like it or Lambert himself.

Eskel shrugged again and gestured for Lambert to help him carry me into the keep.

Over the next few days I learnt a lot about the Wolves and indeed about myself and I have a new theory as to why the different Witcher schools are named after animals.

I don't know whether it's because of the mutations or what but Cat Witchers are vicious, nasty and cruel. Not unlike their animal counterparts. Bears are large, strong, slow, generally placid but capable of immense wrath, not unlike their animal counterparts.

Wolven Witchers behaved like a pack. Even though they separated in the spring every year they were still a pack and you could see it as they came home for the winter. There was still fifteen or so of them left alive at that point and another five who wintered elsewhere. They barely said anything to each other but their greetings towards each other were fiercely affectionate in ways that I had never seen amongst others.

As more and more of them arrived, they just seemed to slot into life. I never saw an allocation of chores, or decisions being made as to who did what, or who would train with whom or so on. They just got on with it.

That included dealing with me. I spent the early part of the Winter off in a spare room recuperating. Other Witchers would just come in with food and to check my dressings. They didn't say anything but the silence wasn't hostile, it was just that they didn't have anything to say. They came in, put the food down. Sometimes they would stick around a bit, play some cards or dice if I was awake, check my bandages and then wander off.

It was nice, it was....pleasant.

I don't know how else to put it.

Eventually I was able to take care of myself and could move down to the great hall which was where I met the legendary Vesemir.

In the Cat school we would treat the elder Cats with a kind reverence. They were old which meant that they had survived for longer than anyone else. They were sages from which we could learn secrets to survival and novices ran after their every need in an effort to please them and gain favour.

Vesemir wasn't like that. Not because the other Wolves didn't respect him but more because... well...

I don't really know how to put it. He just wasn't. The others certainly treated him with a rough kind of respect but he was just as likely to get his tunic dirty with stone cement as anyone else was. His hands were still stained with alchemy ingredients and the two swords that he carried around as a matter of course were well worn and obviously lovingly tended.

The first time I saw him I tried to avoid him as I recognised him from that night but it was no good.

“Hey now, don't slink off,” he called. “Come and sit by the fire with me. I heard Cats like warm places and there are few enough of them in Kaer Morhen.”

I approached cautiously.

“And my old bones appreciate the warmth as well.” He likes to play up to his age, even though he's still hearty and hale enough for most.

I sat nearby and he poured me a tankard of mead that one of the others had had brewing. It wasn't bad.

The silence weighed on me though.

“I wanted to thank you,” I began, “for your hospitality I mean and I promise that I'll be on my way and out of your hair as soon as I am able. Also to Eskel for taking care of me when he didn't have to and arguably shouldn't have.”

Vesemir sniggered. It's always interesting to see an old man snigger like a school boy.

“To where exactly. The passes are all closed. Besides, we look after our own here at Kaer Morhen.”

I took a deep breath and a long swallow from my mead.

“But I am not one of your own.” I tried to put a wealth of what I was thinking into that small sentence. That I was sorry. That I didn't deserve their help. That I had killed many of their students. That I was one of the monsters that they should be hunting. There was all that and more, so much that I couldn't keep track of it.

“Of course you are,” growled Vesemir glaring at me from underneath his bushy eyebrows. “You are a Witcher and Witchers look after each other on the path.”

“But,” I began. I don't know what I would have tried to say.

“But nothing. You're one of us. Witchers from all over the north have spent their Winters in Kaer Morhen. You are just one more.”

I didn't know what to say to that and so I decided to say nothing.

I joined the company and found myself easily accepted into their midst. I started to exercise myself gently on their training machines. They gave me tips and I gave them pointers. At one point I remember giving the assembly a lesson on fighting in the dark which led to much hilarity including a demonstration where I fought two of them while blindfolded and although I didn't beat them. I held them off for far longer than they had expected.

The moment that I truly knew I had been accepted though was when Vesemir took me aside for a swordsmanship lesson and thoroughly schooled me. I am a good swordsman. I was good at the Cat school and there aren't many who I've trained with that are my equal one for one, let alone who are my better and all but a couple of those people are other Witchers. As always it boils down to the situation more than anything but I will freely say that I learnt more and better swordsmanship from a weeks hard training with Vesemir than I ever had under schooling at the school of the cat.

Then he sat me down and taught me about the Wolven code. He taught me about Dragons and why Witchers don't hunt them. About the difference between a monster and a non-human.

He taught me that not all things are monsters. Some don't know any better. Some are sick. Some were born damaged and yes, some are just evil. These things are monsters and as such it is our duty to fight them. To kill them so that others can live.

I asked him how to judge whether something is a monster or not?

He laughed.

Not many Witchers laugh aloud. We tend to be a stoic bunch as a whole and I was surprised by him. As were many of the others it seemed as they looked up to see what the fuss was.

He laughed for a long time.

“As soon as you figure it out,” he said, still laughing. “You tell the rest of us.” He chuckled for a bit longer. “You just live Kerrass. Just live as best you can. The most important thing is this. Do you shave?”

I nodded, confused. “Occasionally when I've got a good mirror. Or it's not to cold.”

He nodded. “Then here's how you do it. If you can look your reflection in the eyes and ask it whether you did your best. If you stayed neutral and didn't give one side or the other the strength to cause more death. If you saved the lives of the people that the thing that you're hunting would have eaten. If you stayed out of petty disputes and if you keep yourself alive so that you can save more lives... If you can do all of those things. If you can look yourself in the mirror and know, and be certain that you did everything you could with the knowledge that you had at the time. Then you're doing it alright.

“Anyone can look back with all of the correct information and say you did the right thing or the wrong thing. But they weren't there at the time. They didn't stand there in your shoes and have to make those decisions.

“The only person that you have to answer to is yourself.”

“That's it?” I remember asking.

“That's it.” he said standing up. “The passes will open in the next couple of days so we'll all start drifting off in the next couple of days and I've no doubt that you will want to do the same. But know that you are always welcome here. Whether for a refuge or somewhere warm to spend the winter.”

“But I took part in the mass...”

He held up his hand to stop me. He looked as old as his years then.

“I know lad. I recognised you the moment I saw you. So did Eskel for that matter as well as a couple of the others. It doesn't matter but I will ask you a question now.”

He drew his sword slowly.

“Knowing what you know now. Would you do it again?”

“Of course not.” I answered knowing that I spoke the truth.

“What would you have done instead?”

“I would have warned you, I would have helped you.”

Vesemir nodded. “See what I mean about looking back?” He sheathed his sword. “You did what your elders told you to. I don't blame you for that. It's what you do with that knowledge that's important now.” He walked off.

I left Kaer Morhen that spring with surprisingly heavy feet. Eskel travelled with me for a couple of weeks and when we did part ways he pulled me into a fierce embrace before passing me a large and heavy coin pouch.

“What's this.” I asked

“Your share. Of the Kikkimore and Wyvern hunt. Your Wyvern helped weaken the Kikkimores so I split the two rewards. That's your share.”

I looked at the pouch and looked back up to see Eskel climbing onto his horse.

“Take care of yourself Kitten,” he said as he turned to ride off.

“Back at you Mongrel.” I shouted at his back.

That was forty years ago but I can still remember how much better the road seemed underneath my feet that spring.

.

.

The Wolves taught me a great deal. I think about who I was when I left the feline keep and who I became. I look back at what they did, what we did and I feel pity for myself, for the other students and indeed for those others who did the teaching and knew no better. Sometimes I get angry about it all. Some times I feel an overwhelming guilt at some of the things I did.

But most days I just focus on walking the path and I think that that's all I can do.

Frederick: It took me a while to realise that Kerrass had finished talking. It's a weird thing to describe but when I'm interviewing someone I go to this strange kind of meditative place where I am aware of what's going on but at the same time it just feels kind of floaty.

It's very similar to how I feel when I'm sat on the back of a horse on my way to wherever. My travelling companion is lost in their own thoughts and if I'm comfortable enough, experienced enough and in tune with my horse enough. I can just kind of drift off.

As a result I was just sat there, my quill poised over the writing waiting for the next words to be noted down and then a sort of.... different quality to the silence made me look up. He had already paused several times during the extraordinary narrative that he'd given me but this time it became clear that there was nothing else to say.

Slowly I started to pack away my things, still in the fog of concentration and holding myself separate from the subject so that I could just note down what they were saying and as a result I answered the next question badly.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Well what?” I responded automatically. I don't know what I was thinking. I suspect part of me wasn't looking forward to turning my short-hand scribblings back into prose over the winter.

“What do you think?” he shot back. Clearly a little agitated.

I blinked at him stupidly for a few moments as my brain caught up with the last few seconds. I realised that I was crouched over the table gathering up the split quills and the blotting sand.

I sat back and thought for a moment before coming to a decision.

“About what?” I knew this wouldn't help him but he needed some truth now.

“About everything,” he hissed, “about me about all of these, these things that I've told you.” He gestured at the papers and I quickly gathered them up in case he decided to destroy them in a fury.

“What do you want me to say Kerrass?”

“I want...I kind of expected you to....”

“You wanted me to judge you. To tell you what I think of you now that I've heard your story?”

He looked at me steadily. The emotion kind of leaked out of him until he was calm and impassive again.

“I thought that was the point about all of this history nonsense. I thought that that's what scholars did.” he said quietly

I smiled faintly. “No, no that's not my job. But let's be fair to each other with some honesty. This,” I gestured at the papers, “is only a fraction of your life isn't it. This is not the best or the worst of your deeds. This does not contain all the lives that you've saved and the heroic deeds that you've done. Nor does it contain all the murder and the atrocities that you've committed does it?”

He didn't need to say anything.

I sighed and scratched my head as I hunted for the right words. It had been a hell of a day and my head was throbbing. I wanted nothing more than to climb into my hammock and go to sleep.

“My job isn't to judge you Kerrass. I couldn't anyway, I'm too close to the subject. You've saved my life numerous times now and I am anything but unbiased. I will admit to being a little bit... unsettled that you have killed children and murdered people in their beds. I was unsettled the first time you told me about the psychoses that Feline Witchers suffer from but that's not enough to make me want to stop travelling with you.”

I was really struggling. I had the sense that he wanted something from me but I didn't know what that thing was and I don't think that he knew what it was either.

“History is judged by those people that come after us. Those men, and hopefully women, who read these things can make their own minds up. I cannot judge whether good deeds outweigh the bad or vice versa. I could give you platitudes if that would make you feel better, about how you're trying to be a better person than you were and that makes all the difference. I could tell you that that old part of you is dead and that you are a new person now of your own making.

“I could remind you that you carried me out of a woodland after besting a demon and then carried me around the countryside looking for healers to help me with my wounds. All things which you didn't have to do.”

He shifted and opened his mouth.

“No, no you didn't,” I interrupted him. Yes you didn't have to take me into the woods in the first place but I made that choice, not you. And even if it was the other way round, one mad scholar versus the lives and souls of that entire village sounds like a good deal from a numbers perspective. You could have just dumped me with the village or the Witch, or the priest, or the whores and just left me to it. You didn't. You carried me from one to the other.”

I sighed again. One of my eyes was beginning to throb with fatigue.

“I've lost track of what I was trying to say.” I said.

“The point is that all of the platitudes are true Kerrass. All of them are true and I know that that doesn't help. I like the sound of this Vesemir person and I would suggest that he is right in this. Do your best with what you know at the time. Or, let me put it another way. Did you kill the ass-hat this morning?”

“No, but you and the other sailors prevented me.”

“Oh come on Kerrass. Honestly now. Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me that three unarmed sailors and a scholar would stop you from killing someone if you really wanted to? Remember that you were armed when you answer that.”

He didn't say anything. He smirked

“You could have just spun and he would have been dead. I would also bet that not a single person on this ship, or any of the people who read about it would blame you. That doesn't make it right though and you knew it then and you know it now. Stop giving yourself a hard time over it.”

He grunted.

“The platitudes are right Kerrass. In my eyes you are not the same person you were. But that doesn't mean you should stop trying to be better.”

He didn't say anything. He just walked off into the dawn. It didn't surprise me to learn that we had worked all night.

He didn't talk to me the following day, or the day after that. But after that, he came back on deck armed and armoured as he had before. We greeted each other and things seemed to go back to

normal.

We parted ways for the Winter at Novigrad docks, he clapped me on the shoulder without saying a word and led his horse into the crowd while I left in search of a barge that would take me upstream towards Oxenfurt.

I spent the Winter wondering how much I had changed over the last 9 months since I met the Witcher and whether I should be proud of the changes.

Then I remembered a small struggling baby boy who screamed as I rescued him from his crib and the Nekkers that were approaching.

I shrugged.

Not for me to judge.