The year was 1227, and the old keep breathed like a creature that had learned to sleep again. Snow still held the northern passes in a white fist, yet within Kaer Morhen's walls the hearths ran hot and steady, and the routines of two hard years had sunk into stone. Those two years had done their work: regress training until muscles remembered what fear tried to erase; monster hunts that did not end with a single slain beast but with mapped patterns, safer roads, and coffers lined by honest bounties; potion tables kept clean enough to double as infirmary counters, every flask stoppered, every label neat. Vesmir's stern patience and Visenna's relentless gentleness had shepherded all of it into habit. Even the wind sounded different in the great hall—no longer a scavenger searching ruins, but weather knocking on a house that was clearly lived in.
Strengthening draughts—brewed only after long debates and longer trials—had become part of the school's late-autumn regimen. Not the feverish horrors that dark tavern tales assigned to witcher making, but measured, cautious distillations built from safer transmutations and tested on carefully chosen nights. Nigredo and albedo carried as tinctures; rubedo reduced to a cordial drop under the tongue; the sharp whisper of quicksilver solution diluted into something a human body could accept without sending a mind wandering off a cliff. Taken under Vesmir's eye, cooled by Visenna's hand, these draughts knit bone, tuned tendon, sharpened the edges where focus frays. They were not miracles. They were craft.
"Enough to lift a gate with two men instead of four," Vesmir had said, the first winter a bar of iron barely creaked at two hands and then rose with four. "Not enough to go looking for one to drop on a head."
The brothers—those who had stood the training's last years, those who had survived the roads before they returned to sleep in their names again—felt the change. Eskel's strikes spent less waste; a lean red-haired lad from Poviss could finally run the inner wall without catching a breath that came apart in his hands. Even the younger ones, who were not yet allowed further than the river with a pail, stood straighter under the weight of the school's new season.
It was Visenna who named what came next. "You have to leave," she said one spring morning, rolling a vial between forefinger and thumb. She said it with no hardness, as if speaking of a certainty like weather. "Not all at once, not forever. Alone. Before you forget that you can stand by yourself and still come home."
Vesmir only nodded; he had known that truth since before some of them were born. "Summer's for rivers," he said. "And for going to see what men call monsters in places where they've never seen their own reflection."
So it was agreed: a solo season for each who could carry himself and carry back news. No dares, no thin bravado. The rule was simple as a knot—go, work, refuse the stupid fight, return in winter. Visenna shaped a smaller corollary: take a letter, write a letter, send a letter. Not for accounting; for thread.
"Where will you go?" Eskel asked Geralt on the morning they strapped buckles and oiled scabbards and sneered at sentiment to keep from drowning in it.
"West to the sea," Geralt said. "And across." He pulled a surcoat over mail that had become invisible to his shoulders after years: deep blue, unadorned save for a discreet banded knot stitched over the heart. A helm with a nasal bar sat near to hand; when worn, it threw his eyes into tall shadow and made him no one worth noting. "A wandering knight pays better than a witcher in some halls," he added. "And Skellige's druids do not open doors to men who announce which school shaped their bones."
"Germist?" Eskel probed, eyes bright with the name from a rumor, a tavern story, and an old map scrawled over endless winter nights.
"Gremist," Geralt corrected, letting the hard g catch in the back of the mouth like a swallowed seed. "If the isles remember him by that tune in this year. If he breathes still. If the path to him is one a man can walk without being turned into a story and left to weather."
"Bring back a list," Vesmir said from the archway, where he had a talent for appearing whenever two young men were trying to pretend they did not want blessing. "Recipes. Materials. Words you were made to say and words you chose."
"Bring back your shadow," Visenna added, because someone must always add the thing too simple for most men to ask.
"I'll be back before the eaves crack," Geralt promised. His knuckles bumped Eskel's shoulder once, then again. Then he swung into the saddle and set his horse's nose toward Redania first, because even a sea journey begins on land.
He went out as a wandering knight and wore the part with a care that made it almost true. He let dockmen take his coin without flinching so they would remember his face kindly. He kept to the watch path on deck and mended a torn sail with the same neat hands that had closed a brother's wound the winter before. He said sir to the shipmaster and did not correct the word. When the sailors sang, he listened, and when they fought, he did not watch like a man inside a window wishing for blood. Skellige's longships carved the fjord's throat as if they were returning a favor to water, and then Ard Skellig rose out of the fog like something a patient god had whittled from a boulder—a jawline split by coves and horned by cliff.
Kaer Trolde's harbor took them in as storms will: abruptly, with a little violence and then relief. Geralt paid without counting. The jarl's men at the dock let a wandering knight pass if he carried himself like work could find him anywhere; so Geralt walked like a man who did not need to be hired to be useful.
Gedyneith lay where every tongue in the isles could find it by feel: a crown of old stones in a grove where trees spilled needles on the ground in a scent that made men's heads go quiet. The druids were not gatekeepers so much as weather—their refusals could be walked around if you knew where the wind died. Geralt did not declare his name. He declared his willingness.
There was one they deferred to when they rolled their eyes, one they left alone when laughter got careless. He had a beard like a hawthorn hedge and eyes that did not blink with visitors. When Geralt found him splitting dry wood with a mallet too heavy for its job, the druid did not stop. He spoke only when the last piece fell clean from the wedge.
"You smell like iron and old oil," he said. "And your teeth are too straight for Skellige. What do you want from the trees?"
"To be told no three times," Geralt answered, surprising even himself with the truth. "And to do something under the sky that is hard enough to make yes mean something."
"Hnh," the druid grunted. "You know my name?"
"Gremist," Geralt said. "If you'll let it be the same this season."
The druid's mouth twisted: not quite a smile, not quite contempt. "You want recipes. You want materials. You want the shortcut other men imagine when they look at the long road."
"I want the road harder," Geralt said. "So the next winter I can carry more."
Gremist set the mallet down with a thud that felt like punctuation. "Practicum," he said. "Three parts. All fails possible."
Geralt inclined his head.
"First," Gremist said, "bring me red pimpernel from a grove where you're not wanted. Not the skirt-hugging hedgeweed down the hill. This one grows where the ground remembers a name and the wind can't blow it off. You'll know the place because your bones will tell you to leave."
"Second," he went on, "take the head of a fork-tail and don't make it look like a butcher did it. Heart whole. Wings uncut. A stupid man can kill one. A careful man can carry it without breaking it in the basket of his arm."
He did not sit for the third. "Third," he said, "you will call rain without begging the sky. Not by yourself. With someone whose head isn't full of the same tricks as yours. If you can't work beside a fool and make a smart thing, you'll ruin half the world and insist it's because the other half is poor."
Geralt almost smiled then, because he had spent enough hours in a long hall to know how fools and smart things often got sorted wrong. "What names do I have to learn for the second part of the third?" he asked.
Gremist squinted at him. "You'll find Fridjarr down at the Whale Graveyard," he said at last, disabused. "He drinks like a fisherman pays him for it. He'll tell you why men prefer to die dry. You'll fix it without being clever at him."
The grove that did not want him lay on Hindarsfjall, in a fold of old earth where a standing stone had fallen and yet still cast judgment. He felt the refusal at his ribs like the beginning of a wrestling match with a friend who knows your tricks. Spruce trunks showed the scars of antlers and claws both; someone larger than an elk had been pleased to own the place. The red pimpernel stirred like an ember under wind that did not move—the flowers always looked like something lit even when they weren't.
Geralt drew his blade and did not move. He let his breath teach the grove what it might expect: the slow count that makes a quarrel go lazy; the way a foot finds a soundless step when a heart stops hammering to be heard. When the spriggan showed itself—antler-crowned, sap-glossed, slow as hunger—it was exactly where it should have been: behind the man who pretended he had not earned an enemy by entering.
He did not speak to it. He did not announce a code. He gave the grove a duel it would feel satisfied to remember: no flourishes, no waste. Two feints that taught the spriggan nothing, one real cut that taught it everything. It went down as if falling asleep and the pimpernel warmed his palm like something forgiven. He left three sprigs at the base of the fallen stone and did not explain the gift to himself or to anyone.
Fork-tail hunts break the men who think wings mean wind only. They do not. Wings mean land as well—power stored up and spent like coin; waiting bought and bought back in dives and climbs until a hunter is too angry to be good. Geralt found his at a Kaer Trolde ridge where wind punished even stones for being in the wrong place. He did not chase. He made the ridge choose him: a stillness so dull a predator's arrogance would call it reward. The fork-tail came in low, scorn a ripple under its skin, and he counted to three of its heartbeats before he moved.
The first strike of steel did not try for bone. It drew a line at the joint that would not kill and would not forgive. The second used the creature's own reach against it, a pivot learned in a yard with Vesmir laughing at boys who think strength is loud. The third was mercy: a thrust that went true so nothing else needed to be done to make the world correct. He stood a long moment with his hand under the fork-tail's jaw, welcoming the familiar weight of success—and the equally familiar itch of sorrow that rode every clean kill. He unpinned wing from rock without tearing the membrane, held the head like a bowl of water, and brought the heart when it was still full of the animal it had been.
The Whale Graveyard was a place made from someone else's breath. Ribs taller than trees arced to the low sky like a prayer a giant forgot. Fridjarr lay under one with a skin of mead and an opinion about everything that did not require a brain. He sang with the wrong words because he liked how they felt in a mouth, and when he stood, the world stood with him a little late.
"Rain," Geralt said, not unkind, when a pause offered itself.
"Rain," Fridjarr said back. "All men think they can have it. No men know why they want it."
"I know why," Geralt said, and when Fridjarr laughed he did not take offense.
He did not persuade the man with cleverness. He carried the mead-skin when asked. He listened to the story that had more gestures than facts. He did not sigh when Fridjarr forgot which whale was which and waved his arms until a gull thought it was being spoken to. He let the man find the rhythm of his own steps and did not trip him when he found it late.
When the rite began, he did not lead. He followed like a man on a longship who trusts the oars and the man calling the stroke. He kept his own voice behind Fridjarr's like a second river under water. He let the words taste wrong in his mouth until the wind decided they tasted like words at all. When rain came, it was not sharp. It was patient—the kind that soaks a knee first and a collar second and then suddenly the world is a different element entirely.
Back at Gedyneith, Gremist took the pimpernel without lowering his eyes. He lifted the fork-tail head and let it fall back into Geralt's arms as if testing whether the man or the trophy would be heavier. He dropped water from Fridjarr's rain on his palm and licked it, which was a thing no man who did not believe in the old gods should ever have found wise.
"Recipes," he said finally, and led Geralt into a hut that smelled like a forest having a conversation with a forge. He took narrow bundles from places that were not shelves and set them down as if settling infants. He spoke ingredients in a cadence that would make sense to a throat next winter: sea holm fiber spun with dimeritium thread; puffball dust cut to behave; the difference between monk's-hood resin gathered at noon and at dusk; how much a finger's thickness meant when a winter's cold had slimmed hands.
He gave him charts men would call "just drawings" until their breasts burned with ruin trying to copy them: coils for alembics that made metal embarrassed to be so clumsy; clamps a woman with one hand could use to hold a flask while a man with both coaxed gold from the last breath of a fire. He gave him sturdy things as well: schema for superior oils that did not brag, bombs that froze in cones clean enough to be measured, processes for transmuting common salts to something that would behave in the mouth of a flask like a taught child in the mouth of a classroom.
He did not smile. "This is a long road in narrow lines," he said. "Do not run on it."
Geralt packed as a man does who knows weight decides everything: parchment rolled in waxed leather, coils nested in his cloak where body heat would keep condensation from eating brass, vials corked only by things that had proved they would not betray a man at the last inch.
He worked his way off the isles the way he had entered them—walking like a man whose feet trust him. A wandering knight will always get a room if he nods right and pays often. He saw monsters, of course—sirens that had decided fishermen's hands smelled like a thing they had been promised, a troll that solved problems by lifting things until they were in different places, a cyclops who had simply never been told he took up more space than his share. He did what he was meant to do without staying to hear himself praised. He gave his last night's bread to a boy with a cough and did not say the name of the woman who had taught him to do that.
He made Redania by a dusk that took its time, trotted the horse until his own legs begged to be needed again, and took the Kaedweni passes while they were still playing at winter. Kaer Morhen rose from the mountain like a sentence you already know the end of and still like to hear. He went in by the smaller gate because only men who want applause use the big one.
Visenna counted his breath first and his vials second. Vesmir held up a coil and made a face as if tasting new wine his friend had told him not to insult. Eskel slapped his shoulder once and stole a recipe with his eyes and put it back before anyone could accuse him of anything.
They cleared a table and did not cover it again for three days. They brewed half the night and twice the morning. They made mistakes once each and never again. They tested only on metals and waters and prayers. They wrote down what could be spoken and drew what could not. They bickered like brothers and shut up like men who know life is short. They stored what had to sleep and used what had to be woken.
When winter finally laid down on the eaves and refused to get up, the brothers came in by ones and twos, hungry and too proud to say it. The great hall took them because it had learned how. Lembert ran through legs and fetched cups and fell asleep without asking because no one would have denied him. Rina put three extra bowls on a table by habit and smiled when they filled. Berngar stamped the cold out of his boots and then forgot to put them back on for two hours. Vesmir stood by the door and said nothing except "Close it," and Visenna cut bread and pretended she had not stayed up all night waiting for certain steps.
"When?" Eskel asked Geralt, chin toward the alembics, nod toward the recipes locked away as if words could spoil them.
"Later," Geralt said, because this was not the hour to hand out miracles like dried apples to boys who had come home from the river. "Tonight we feed. Tomorrow we remember. After that we boil the world down until it tells the truth."
"Skellige?" Vesmir asked, eyebrow doing what entire conversations cannot.
"Yes," Geralt said simply.
"Gremist?" Visenna said, not demanding gossip—asking for a measure of whether the man who had taken his name kept it worthily.
"He's as he deserves to be," Geralt said, and poured her tea with a hand that did not shake.
Later—when the hall had gone soft with contented bodies and the wind had given up trying to get in—Geralt unrolled a single parchment and laid it flat. It was not the most glamorous. It was not the hardest. It was the one needed first: a better Swallow for men who keep other men alive by making sure they sleep the second half of the night. Under it, he placed oil charts for monsters the passes would see by late thaw, and a bomb schema that would stop a cave's mouth from telling men to make stupid choices.
"I went as a wandering knight," he said into the room that had decided he did not have to explain himself.
"You came back as a witcher," Vesmir said, and raised a cup only halfway because raising it higher would have made too many throats tight.
"And a student," Visenna added. "Don't get excited."
Geralt laughed without armor because this was the one place a man could take it off and still be accounted for. He slept that night like he was being kept on purpose, and in the morning he woke up already reaching for a knife that would open a crate of herbs instead of a man.
Winter did what winters do, and the school did what schools made of grief and stubbornness do too: it worked. Alone had sharpened; together would grind. Men came out of the passes with news and went back with bread. Children laughed in a hall that had once only echoed, and women's hands made things that did not kill anyone. The coils hummed when heat found them, the recipes turned pale liquids into promises, and the keep practiced the oldest craft of all as if it had invented it—letting a door stay closed when the people inside need to learn to sleep all the way to morning.