The winter broke late that year, and when it broke, it did so with the sullen grace of a man rolling out of a tavern after three bad decisions and a promise he'd meant to keep. Geralt and his company—Eskel, Dick, and Vicky—came down from Kaer Morhen on horses that had learned winter and forgotten complaint. The passes were melted and mud, the rivers swollen and talking to themselves in languages no priest had bothered to write down. They traveled light: blades, provisions, coin sewn into hems where thumbs couldn't find it, and masks rolled into oilcloth that smelled of leather and intentions.They moved through Kaedwen with the studied indifference of men who have learned that kingdoms notice you more when you notice them back. They bought bread in villages that didn't ask questions and slept in barns whose owners understood that discretion pays better than gossip. Kaedwen was a country that had learned how to hold grudges and call them history; Geralt returned the favor by holding his tongue and counting the miles.It was Dick who heard it first, in a coaching inn where the ale was honest and the conversation was louder than it needed to be. A conversation between two men in surveyor's boots and ink-stained cuffs, the kind who measure the world in rods and chains and believe the future is a straight line if you simply remove the obstacles."—stalled again. Third week running. The engineers are threatening to walk if the Crown doesn't send mages.""Mages won't fix it. You can't negotiate with necrophages. They've dug in along the entire western stretch—ghouls, grave hags, something the scouts are calling a 'bruxae nest,' though I'll believe that when I see the bodies. Work crews won't go near it after dark, and half of them won't go near it at all. We're paying them to stand around and look nervous."What's the delay costing?""Two thousand crowns a week. More if you count the bribes to keep the nobility from asking why their precious highway to Ard Carraigh looks like a ditch full of corpses. "Dick relayed this to Geralt with the carefully neutral tone of a man who knows a grenade when he sees one and prefers not to be standing near it when it detonates. Geralt listened, drank his ale, and said nothing until they were outside under a sky that had decided rain was a threat it would make good on eventually."Kaedwen," Geralt said, as if the name were a thumb pressed into a bruise to see if it still hurt. "Aye," Eskel said. "The same Kaedwen that likes burning keeps when the mood takes them."Vicky, who had been checking the horses' shoes with the kind of care that speaks to not wanting to have opinions about what comes next, straightened and waited. Geralt's face did something that wasn't quite a smile. "They're building a highway. Important one, by the sound of it. Royal project. Connects the north trade routes to Ard Carraigh. Probably cuts three days off the grain shipments and a week off the military marches.""And monsters have made it expensive," Dick said"Very expensive.""You're thinking," Eskel said, watching Geralt the way a man watches a dog that's begun to growl at nothing visible, "of making it more expensive.""I'm thinking," Geralt said slowly, "that Kaedwen burned Kaer Morhen in 1170. Killed boys. Killed masters. Killed the idea that a witcher school could exist without a kingdom's permission. They came with writs and torches and the righteousness of men who believe their own songs. And they have never apologized. Never paid. Never even pretended the debt exists.""Revenge," Vicky said, not as condemnation, merely as taxonomy."Accounting," Geralt corrected. "They want a highway. I'll make sure they earn it.""Alone?" Eskel asked."Alone," Geralt confirmed. "You three go on to Novigrad. Set up the first contacts. Rent the warehouse. Meet with Vivaldi's agent. Start the work we agreed to. I'll catch up in two weeks—three if the weather decides to be difficult.""And if you don't?" Dick asked."Then you'll know I got careless, and you can decide whether to come looking or to toast my memory and carry on."They did not argue. Argument would have been an insult to the clarity of what was being said. Eskel clasped his forearm. Vicky nodded once. Dick grinned the grin of a man who knows a bad idea can still be a correct one and said, "Don't let them make you into a song. Songs are terrible pay."They parted at the crossroads. Four riders went west, toward Novigrad and the future they were building out of masks and coin. One rider went north, toward a highway that was learning how much history costs when you refuse to settle the bill. The construction site sprawled across five miles of what had been decent farmland and marginal forest. Kaedwen's engineers had laid out the route with the arrogance of men who believe nature is simply bad planning: straight where it could be straight, bridged where it had to cross water, elevated where the ground dared to be uneven. Camps dotted the line—laborers' tents, foremen's huts, a pavilion for the nobleman overseeing the work, complete with banners that announced his presence to anyone who cared and many who didn't. Geralt scouted for a day and a half, moving through the forest margins like a man made of patience and bad weather. He noted the guard rotations, the supply wagons, the places where men gathered to smoke and complain. He noted, more importantly, the places they avoided: a dell where the earth had been turned and poorly covered, a copse near the old quarry where the trees had grown strange, a stretch of bottomland where the mist came up even at noon and stayed. The monsters were there. Of course they were. Men dig holes and call them progress; the dead come up to see what the noise is about. Ghouls had taken to the construction spoil-heaps like children to a playground. Grave hags circled the camps at night, testing the wards that sellsword mages had scrawled in chalk and hoped would hold. A pair of alghouls had claimed the old stone bridge as territory and were defending it with the kind of commitment that suggested they'd read the surveyor's plans and taken offense. Geralt did not kill them. He bound them. The first night, he set a circle in a clearing a quarter-mile from the nearest camp. The Supreme Master-Servant sigil, drawn on cured arachas hide, anchored with his blood and powered by a focus of will that made his teeth ache. He lured a ghoul-pack with the scent of spoiled meat and the sound of something dying badly—ghouls are not clever, but they are predictable. When they came, he used Aard not to kill but to herd, corralling them into the circle's embrace one by one until six of the shambling things stood inside the runes, their breath wheezing, their claws scraping stone. He bled onto the Master sigil. He spoke the command in Elder Speech, each syllable a nail driven into the contract. The circle flared, accepted, bound. The ghouls became his—not companions, not allies, but tools that walked and ate and waited for orders. You do not leave the highway zone. You do not attack laborers unless they carry weapons. You attack soldiers on sight. You attack mages on sight. Mages you kill—all of them without mercy, together, no hesitation. Soldiers you wound and drive off. You make noise. You make fear. You make this road cost more than Kaedwen wants to pay.They did not answer. They did not need to. The bond was absolute. The second night, he took a grave hag. She was old, clever, and suspicious in the way that things which have survived by being hard to catch always are. He used himself as bait—walked the edge of her territory with his guard deliberately down, let her think he was tired, let her commit to the lunge. When she came, he met her not with silver but with Axii, a mental shove that made her stumble mid-leap, and in that stumble he had time to maneuver her into the circle he'd prepared hours earlier. She fought longer than the ghouls. The binding took blood—his, hers, a negotiation written in red across parchment that would have made a scribe weep. But when it was done, she was his, and he gave her the same orders with one addition: Stay near the pavilion. Make the nobleman hear you at night. Make him doubt his wards. The third night brought alghouls. The pair at the bridge were territorial and proud, which made them vulnerable in ways that caution could not save them from. He drew them out with insults—territorial insults, the kind that involved scent-marks placed deliberately in the wrong places and stones thrown to suggest another pack was moving in. When they charged, he was ready with a pit trap lined with his circle-skins, and when they tumbled in, snarling and clawing, he completed the binding from the edge of the pit and felt the contract take hold even as they thrashed. Hold the bridge. Let no supplies cross. Kill mages. Wound soldiers. Scatter laborers if they try to force the crossing. Make them build another bridge, and when they do, I will send you to that one too.The fourth and fifth nights he spent binding nekkers—small, vicious, and endless. They bred faster than men could count and died faster than men could care, which made them perfect for this kind of work. He bound them in clusters, ten at a time, their tiny minds accepting commands with the enthusiasm of creatures who lived to swarm and were simply being given permission to do it in a more organized fashion. Dig under the road. Collapse the fill. Undermine the surveyor's stakes. Attack soldiers. Attack mages. If a mage raises a hand, you go for the throat—all of you, at once. By the sixth night, he had bound over forty monsters to his will—ghouls, grave hags, alghouls, nekkers, two endrega warriors that had been drawn to the construction noise and were delighted to discover their new purpose involved making more of it. He spread them along the highway route like a curse written in flesh and claw, each cluster positioned to maximize disruption without spilling over into the surrounding countryside. He was not indiscriminate. He ordered them away from farms, away from villages, away from travelers who carried nothing but packs and worry. This was not a massacre. This was a tax, paid in fear and delay, and the only people who would pay it were the ones who wore Kaedwen's colors and drew Kaedwen's coin. The seventh night, he tested the orders. He watched from a treelined as a squad of soldiers—eight men in mail, two with crossbows, one with a sergeant's confidence—attempted to clear the bridge. The alghouls met them with a coordinated assault that was not natural, not instinctive, but learned. One alghoul feinted left; the other struck right. The soldiers broke formation. Crossbow bolts flew wide. The sergeant shouted orders that his men could not follow because the alghouls were not behaving the way monsters were supposed to behave—they were behaving like soldiers, like a unit that had been drilled. The squad retreated. No deaths, but three wounded badly enough that they'd spend a week in a cot remembering why soldiers hate this work. Geralt watched from the shadows and felt nothing. No guilt. No satisfaction. Just the cold arithmetic of a debt being repaid. The eighth night, a mage arrived. Geralt smelled him before he saw him—the distinct ozone-and-roses stink of someone who had bathed in power and forgotten how to rinse. The mage was young, confident, and stupid in the way that men who have never been truly afraid are stupid. He walked into the dell where the ghouls waited, hands already glowing with the kind of fire that makes peasants kneel and watchers sigh. He got three syllables into his incantation before the ghouls swarmed. Six of them, moving as one, coordinated by a will that was not theirs but had become theirs through the bonds Geralt had forged. The mage's shield held for four seconds. His scream lasted longer. Geralt did not watch the end. He had given the order; the outcome was inevitable. He moved on to the next cluster, checked their positioning, adjusted their patrol routes, and made sure they understood that mages were the priority. Soldiers could be driven off. Mages had to be destroyed because mages would find ways to unbind his work if given time, and time was the one thing Kaedwen would not get cheaply here.The ninth night, he bound a foglet. It was reluctant, slippery, hard to pin down in the circle because foglets are made of in-betweens, and the Master-Servant sigil prefers things with clear edges. But he managed, through patience and a trick involving salt and sound that Yennefer had mentioned once in passing, and when it was done, he had a monster that could make entire sections of the road disappear into mist so thick that horses stumbled and wagons overturned. Stay near the western camp. Rise at dusk. Make the road vanish. Do not harm civilians. Soldiers, you confuse. Mages you lead into the others' claws. On the tenth day, he sat on a ridge overlooking the highway and counted his work. Over sixty monsters now, all bound, all positioned, all waiting for the orders he had burned into their simple, brutal minds. The construction had stalled entirely. Laborers refused to work. Soldiers refused to patrol. The nobleman in the pavilion was reportedly composing furious letters to the capital, demanding more mages, more men, more money. Geralt allowed himself a thin smile. Money. Yes. Let them spend it. Let them pour gold into this road the way they had poured fire into Kaer Morhen. Let them learn that some debts accrue interest, and the interest is paid in frustration and fear and the slow, grinding realization that the world does not owe them progress simply because they have decided they deserve it. He did not stay to watch the chaos unfold. He had set the machine in motion; it would run without him. The monsters would hold the line until they died or until Kaedwen gave up, and either outcome was acceptable. He packed his circles, checked his horse, and turned south toward Novigrad and the company that waited for him there. As he rode, he thought about Vesemir's words from the winter council: We finish what we begin. This was not finished. This was simply started. But it was started correctly, with precision and without waste, and that would have to be enough. Kaedwen would build its highway eventually. Men always do. But they would build it slower, more expensively, and with the nagging suspicion that the forest had taken offense and was keeping score. And somewhere in the Blue Mountains, in a keep that had survived fire and time and the arrogance of kings, children would grow up a little safer because the kingdom that had tried to burn them was now too busy fighting ghouls to remember why it had hated watchers in the first place. It wasn't justice. Justice is for courts and songs. This was simply a bill, presented and paid, and Geralt of Rivia—selfish, methodical, and utterly unrepentant—rode south with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has balanced a ledger that everyone else had been content to leave open. The highway could wait. Kaedwen could wait. The monsters, bound and patient and absolutely loyal to the will that had claimed them, would make sure of it.