Matthias Harlow
Road to the River Trava, Angren
1253
The road between Dregsdon and the Trava river was longer, than I thought it would be, though not unpleasant.
Angren did not do sunshine the way other places did, even at its edges, it did not offer any cleanly or with any particular generosity. What light came through, came sideways, filtered through a ceiling of low grey cloud that sat on the horizon. The grass on either side of the road was a deep, saturated green, the kind that only came from being rained on consistently. The road itself was packed earth and loose stone, darkened by last night's surprise drizzle, and the hoofbeats of the horses came back muffled and soft, absorbed by the damp.
But like I said It was not unpleasant, to the West of us lied a forest, my memories told me was named Groundcherry, to the Wast of it, were a group of villages where the Trava river forked into the Ina and just South of it was Sodden Hill, this land was quiet, dull and grey, but pleasant.
I felt strange riding through it so peacefully. In a little over a decade this ground would be unrecognizable. The Battle of Sodden Hill would tear through this region with over a hundred thousand men on opposing sides, Nilfgaard pressing north to spread their Empire, the Northern mages burning themselves out on the hill to stop them. The land would remember it for generations and a monument would be built recognizing the sacrifice of the thirteen sorceresses who died here and the one who lived.
Not that it stopped the Witch Hunts from happening.
For now though it was just wet grass and grey sky and the distant line of trees marking where the edge of where the Trava ran, and the only sounds were the horses and the occasional indifferent crow hunched on a sign post with its feathers puffed against the cold.
I rode without my armor.
It was packed across Epine's back, carefully wrapped to keep the plates from knocking against each other and announcing us to every living thing within half a mile. I regretted intentionally letting that forktail have at it, lost as I was in the drama of the fight. Whilst without it I was considerably less conspicuous, I was still very much a head turner still, a pale man on a good horse in a plain linen shirt and riding trousers, the sword on the saddle, and said saddles embroidery the only thing that hinted at my fabricated knighthood.
Syanna rode beside me, still in the clothes she had managed to procure for herself in Dregsdon whilst I was out killing monsters. They fit better than Crespi's had, which was not saying a great deal, but she had stopped having to cinch a belt to keep the trousers on, a few days of eating and her cheeks were already less gaunt, which I counted as progress.
She had kept her cloak on due to the fog-Natural this time- at this precise moment she was tilting her face up toward whatever thin grey light the clouds were willing to part with.
I had noticed she did that sometimes. Found small things to occupy the boredom of the road and held onto them quietly. It was one of the more human habits she had. "You look like a noble playing at stable hand," she said, without looking at me.
"Thank you," I said sarcastically.
"It wasn't a compliment." She said with a snort.
"I know," I said. "I chose to receive it as one anyway."
She glanced at me sideways. "The sword gives you away. And the horse."
"I'm not trying to pretend to be a commoner Sylvia, it would be stupid of me to intentionally lower my social standing, this is simply more comfortable given the weather." I said, an easy grin on my face.
She faced me then, question on her face. "Can you even feel the weather?"
"Not the way you do," I admitted. "But I can feel the difference between plate armor in damp air and a shirt in damp air, and one of those options does not smell like the inside of a dead mans helm."
She accepted that with a considering expression on her face, I watched her from the corner of my eye as she straightened slightly in the saddle, that small unconscious adjustment of posture that reminded me, not for the first time, exactly who she was underneath the borrowed clothes.
She was livelier today than she had been last night, more talkative, easier in her movements. The best way I could describe it was that the last invisible wall between us had quietly come down sometime between Divenire fading into the dark and the horses being saddled when we headed out late morning. She had not made a production of it, she simply was marginally less defended than she had been the day before.
"When are you going to start training me?" she asked.
I glanced at her. She was looking ahead at the road, her tone deliberately casual in the way that meant the question had been sitting with her for a while and she had decided this moment was as good as any to voice it.
I looked at her properly for a moment She was still painfully thin, weeks of deliberate starvation did not reverse itself in a few days of inn food and camp rations, and the clothes she wore, adequate as they were, did nothing to hide the sharp jut of her collarbones or the way her wrists sat too narrow in her sleeves. She was eating, consistently and without the pride-driven hesitation of the first few days, which was progress. But progress was slow and the road was not a rest house.
"Not for a while yet," I said.
She frowns at that, "You promised you train me."
"I did," I agreed. "And I haven't changed my mind."
She looked at me then. "Then what are you saying?"
"I'm saying we start when I believe you understand what you're agreeing to," I said. "You've been running on survival instinct for weeks, Syanna. Every decision you've made since Caed Dhu has been about getting through the next hour. Not that you were wrong to, it's what the situation required." I paused. "But I won't put a sword in your hand while you're still in that mode of thought." I kept my eyes on the road. "But I'll be honest with you about the other reason as well."
"Which is..."
I nodded toward her, a small gesture that took in all of her, the borrowed clothes, the thin arms, the careful way she held herself in the saddle that I had initially read as poise and had since come to understand was partly conservation of energy.
"You'd barely hold a practice sword for 15 minutes right now," I said. "Never mind a real one. Your grip strength alone would give out before we got anywhere useful and pushing through it would just injure you." I kept my voice matter of fact, no softening to it, because she would have heard the softening and resented it. "Six weeks of near starvation does not disappear in a week of eating properly. Your body needs time to rebuild before I put demands on it that it isn't ready to meet."
She said nothing for a moment. A muscle worked in her jaw. "So I have to wait," she said.
"You have to eat," I corrected. "Consistently and properly, which you are already doing, so that part is handled. And you have to give it time." I glanced at her. "A few weeks. Maybe less if you're disciplined about it, which I suspect you will be."
She looked back at the road. The irritation was present but she was sitting with it rather than throwing it at me, which I took as another small sign of the wall being down.
I decided to offer her a reprieve "The first thing I'll teach you isn't a stance or a grip anyway," I continued. "It's the difference between reacting and deciding. That part we can start now, on horseback, on the road, without you needing to lift anything."
She huffed in disbelief. "You're going to teach me philosophy on horseback."
"I'm going to teach you to think before you move," I said. "Which in your case is going to be the harder lesson than anything physical." She opened her mouth. Closed it. Which proved my point rather neatly, I thought, though I kept that observation to myself.
"And how long does all of it take," she said after a moment.
"Depends entirely on you," I said. We travelled on the strangely empty road after that, it followed the natural curve of the land, dipping slightly as it approached the last bend towards where the Trava ran, the wet grass on either side deepening in colour as the ground grew softer underfoot. The horses moved at an easy pace, unhurried, their breath misting faintly in the chill air.
A flock of starlings turned overhead, shifting and folding against the grey sky like smoke. Syanna watched them for a while without comment. "It's strange, isn't it," she said eventually, her eyes coming back down to the road ahead.
"How empty this is. There are tracks on it, so it isn't abandoned, but I thought we'd have passed at least one traveler by now. It's not as though there's a war on."
"Some people passed through here earlier," I said. "Just after dawn."
She glanced at me. "And how can you tell that?"
I shrugged slightly. "Other than my preternatural monster senses? I saw one of them pass by around dawn, while you were still asleep."
The road ran straight ahead toward the Trava, and beyond it, just visible through the mist and distance, the bridge that connected the crossing to the Pass of Klamat. The river itself was still some way off, the sound of rushing water just distinguishable from here, the bridge was visible, a pale narrow stroke across the water.
I squinted.
My eyes sharpened without my asking them to, the distance collapsing in the way it did when I let the instinct take over rather than fighting it. Details resolved themselves out of the grey. The bridge. The road on the far side. And on the near side, clustered at the crossing in a way that explained very neatly why we had not passed a single soul in the last two hours, a group of soldiers.
They had stopped a small knot of travellers at the bridge head. I couldn't make out the words at this distance, even with my hearing it was too far and the wind was moving the wrong way, carrying the sound off across the fields rather than toward us. I couldn't make out faces either, or the specifics of what was happening between the soldiers and the people they had stopped.
What I could make out was the blue.
The uniforms were a light, eye catching blue that stood out against the grey of the morning like a blooming flower. If it hadn't been for that color I might have taken them for a merchant's guards or a private escort at this distance.
I pulled Epine to a gentle halt and held up a hand.
"Look lively," I said. "There's a commotion up ahead."
Syanna drew her horse up beside me and leaned forward slightly in the saddle, squinting at the bridge. "I can barely make them out," she said. "How many?"
"Six soldiers that I can see," I said. "Three or four travelers. Could be more on either side that the bridge approach is blocking." I kept my eyes on the scene, watching for movement, for the specific body language that separated a routine checkpoint from something uglier. "The travelers haven't moved in a while. That's either because they're being processed or because they've been told very firmly not to."
"Which do you think it is," she asked.
The wind shifted fractionally, carrying a fragment of sound toward us. Not words. Just tone. The particular flat authoritative register of someone who was used to not being questioned.
"The second one," I said.
She looked at me. "Do we go around?"
I considered the river. The Trava ran quick and dark between steep banks this far east, the water level would be higher than usual. Swimming it on horseback was impossible and waiting for a barge big enough for our horses, and that would sail down towards Razwan and into the Ina to Maribor would cost us time and coin.
"No," I said. "We go through."
I stopped Epine and dismounted in one clean motion, boots finding the wet grass without ceremony. I looped her reins over a low branch at the road's edge and went to the saddlebag, pulling back the canvas and digging until I found what I was looking for. A cloak and doublet were folded flat beneath the spare tack, the doublet black with red embroidery, well cut, and the cloak a muted grey I shook them out, checked them for road dust, and found them acceptable.
I shrugged into the doublet and worked the buttons from the bottom up, and the cloak over it, unhurried, aware of Syanna watching me from horseback with a questioning look. "A doublet," she said. "That's your solution."
"It's a starting point, a good first impression" I said, fastening the last button at the collar and fastening the clasp of the cloak.
The sword and scabbard came off the saddle next.
Reaching for the sword belt, I buckled it around my waist, settled the scabbard against my hip, and checked that the blade sat right. Then I looked up at her.
She had one eyebrow still raised, her expression somewhere between amusement and assessment, running her eyes over the result with a critical thoroughness and more than a little bit of sarcasm.
"Well," she said after a moment. "It's better than the shirt."
"High praise, from a princess I am sure." I said, pulling the hood up over my head and gathering Epine's reins and remounting.
"That was observation, don't mistake it for a compliment," she said a bit rushed.
"Wouldn't dream of it." I settled back into the saddle and nudged Epine forward, back onto the road. "You were the one calling me a stable hand. Wouldn't want them mistaking me for a peasant after all."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh, swallowed before it could become one, and clicked her horse forward to ride beside me. "You could show up in rags and no one would mistake you for a peasant, a specter maybe."
The checkpoint was more organized than it had looked from a distance.
Four soldiers held the near side of the bridge, two flanking the road and two standing closer to the crossing itself, their posture the particular brand of bored authority that came from spending too long doing a job that mostly involved telling people no. A fifth sat on a supply crate to one side, helmet off, eating something wrapped in cloth with a focused dedication only a hungry man could muster.
The travelers who had been stopped were a small group, the loudest among them a merchant by the look of him, stout and red faced, with a laden cart pulled by a single horse and a boy who was probably his son, judging by their features, standing slightly behind him.
"I have perishables on this cart," the merchant was saying, his voice strained to the edge of something unpleasant. "Do you understand what that means? Perishables! Things that rot. Things I paid good coin for that will be worth nothing by the time your commander decides he's ready to do something about this!"
"Like I said, road's closed," the soldier said.
"Then hire a witcher!"
A second soldier, larger than the first, turned from where he had been leaning against the bridge railing with an expression that I recognized from months of hospitality work.
"Do you see a gods damned witcher around here?" he said, spreading his arms to indicate the empty road, the wet fields, the uncooperative grey sky.
"Do you? You daft cunt! Standing there telling me to hire a witcher like I'm some innkeeper who served you the wrong bowl of slop!" He took a step toward the merchant, jabbing a finger. "The next man who talks back is going to get a clobber on the ear for talking back to an infantryman, I promise you that on my mother's grave."
The merchant opened his mouth. "Father, please." his son said quietly from behind him. The merchant closed his mouth.
I brought Epine to a halt at the edge of the group and took in the scene properly. Six soldiers total, four on the bridge approach and two flanking the road, they were dressed in the blue and silver of Temeria, their silver lilies standing out against the blue. The merchant and his son with a work horse, tied to a cart standing in the resigned posture of people who had been waiting long enough to give up on being angry about it, and a group of three travelers beside them.
"That doesn't apply to me I hope." I interrupted the scuffle as I brought Epine to a halt at the edge of the group before it could escalate further. The soldier nearest the road noticed us first, his eyes moving from Syanna to me with the automatic professional assessment of someone trained to read approaching strangers quickly, and whatever he found in his read made him straighten almost immediately.
"Ser," he said, the irritation of the previous exchange smoothed out of his voice with practiced efficiency. He pressed a fist to his chest in a short salute. "Apologies for the disruption. If you'll give me a moment I'll have this sorted."
He said the last part with a look at the merchant that strongly implied sorted did not mean resolved in the merchant's favor.
"I'd rather you tell me why you've barred the way," I said.
He turned back to me properly then, and I watched the moment his eyes found my face beneath the hood of the cloak. The reaction was subtle, a brief stillness, the slight widening that people tried to suppress and rarely managed completely. His gaze moved across my features with the careful quality of someone trying to reconcile what they were seeing with what they understood a person was supposed to look like.
To his credit he recovered quickly.
"Ser," he said again, with slightly more careful deference than before. "The road is closed I'm afraid. Troll took up residence under the bridge a week ago. Won't let anyone cross, unless they pay a toll. Threw an infantryman into the river yesterday when he tried to get rid of it, horse and all." He kept his voice matter of fact, professional. "Orders from the garrison commander, no crossing until the situation is resolved."
"Has anyone actually tried talking to it," I said.
The soldier blinked. "Ser?"
"Talking," I said. "Going down there and having a conversation with it." The soldier and the large infantryman exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation.
"...It's a troll ser," the large one said carefully.
"I'm aware," I said.
"They're not known for their," he searched for the word, "conversational ability."
"Some of them are," I said. "This one has been asking for coin rather than killing people outright. That's not the behavior of a creature that wants a fight."
Another exchanged look between the soldiers. One of the soldiers by the bridge muttered under his breath. "Vik, might disagree with that, dumb bastard was pissed when we fished him out down stream."I used that to add to my argument.
"Bruised egos aside, there haven't been any casualties. There might still be a peaceful resolution to this," I said, looking toward the bridge.
The coin toll was the detail that mattered.
A troll asking for coin, imitating human commerce, meant it had at least a rudimentary understanding of it. Demanding payment instead of simply killing passersby was, at the very least, not acting out of blind hostility.
It protected the bridge. People who used it paid for that service. From its perspective, the arrangement was entirely logical.
Which meant it could be reasoned with, if you came at it correctly. "What is it using the money for?" I asked.
The soldier stared at me. "Ser?"
"The toll. what does it do with it?"
He looked at his companion. His companion looked at the bridge with an embarrassed expression. "Vodka and Ale, if you can believe it, it broke into the garrisons stores and left some coins behind, its half the reason, Vik, the lad that was thrown into the river, attacked it in the first place."
...
"What?" I asked in disbelief, there was an awkward silence at the revelation.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard today.
The merchant unable to help himself, commented. "I've crossed this bridge a dozen times and never paid so much as a copper. A troll sets up camp and suddenly it's demanding—"
"I thought I warned you," the first soldier said, with the flat patience of a man who had heard this particular speech several times already today.
"Ahem," the merchant relented, muttering snide remarks underneath his breath.
I looked past the soldier toward the bridge. From here I could see a bit of the underside of the arch—the wide, dark space where the water ran fast between the banks. Nothing was visible at this distance, but the smell reached me all the same, something animal and old, a particular musk I had no reference for, and beneath it lingered another scent I was all too familiar with, sharper and a little rancid, like a distillery gone to ruin.
And under it all, a sound. Low. Grinding. Like stone dragging against stone.
It must be sleeping off the drunkenness.
The soldier's eyes drifted then, the way someone's eyes did when something unexpected entered the peripheral vision. They dropped from my face to the side of Epine's saddle, where the forktail head hung wrapped in rope and canvas, the blunt scaled snout just visible at the bottom of the bundle, unmistakably reptilian and large.
His mouth opened slightly.
The large soldier who had been arguing with the merchant stepped closer, following his companion's gaze, and his expression moved through several stages in quick succession before settling somewhere between professional caution and reluctant curiosity.
"Is that a—" he started.
"Ser Matthias?"
The voice came from the cluster of waiting travelers. Surprised at hearing my name, even though I had not introduced myself, I turned towards where the voice came from.
A young man was pushing his way forward from the back of the group, past the merchant and his son, past one of the other travelers who leaned aside to let him through. He was perhaps in his early to mid twenties, skinny, with the calloused hands and a direct gaze. He had the look of a man moving on pure momentum, like he had spotted me from distance and had been working up to this ever since.
He stopped a few paces short and pulled his coif off with both hands, clutching it to his chest.
"It is you," he said, slightly breathless. "I thought I recognized the horse, I wasn't sure until I saw—" his eyes moved briefly and involuntarily to my face, then away, with the same careful quality the soldier had managed rather less subtly. "My name is Aldric ser. My sister is Marta." He swallowed, the cap turning between his fingers. "She was at home yesterday when those men came through Dregsdon."
He stopped for a moment, something working in his jaw.
"You saved her life," he said. "She was the one they were trying to...when you—" he stopped again, apparently deciding the details didn't need repeating in present company. He looked up at me directly instead. "I was there too. In the square. I saw what you did for us."
He straightened slightly, something deliberate in it, and pressed his fist to his chest the same way the soldier had, an imperfect imitation of the salute but earnest enough that the soldier beside me had the grace not to comment on it.
"I just wanted to say thank you Ser," he said. "Properly. Before you rode off and I lost the chance."
The entire group was looking at me now with a new quality of attention. The soldier who had been staring at the forktail head had apparently set that particular question aside for the moment, his eyes moving between Aldric and me curiously.
Syanna said nothing, though there was an awkward tension to her shoulders at the mention of Dregsdon.
I looked at Aldric. He was still holding his coif to his chest, waiting, with a particular eagerness of someone who had rehearsed this moment and was now simply hoping it went the way he had imagined it.
"How is she," I said. "Marta."
His face broke into something relieved and unguarded all at once. "Shaken ser," he said. "But alive. She'll be alright." A pause. "She asked me to find you if I could, when I told her of my intentions to travel to visit our uncle. I wasn't sure I'd manage it, to be honest so I figured if I saw you I'd just—"
"Tell her I'm glad," I said simply.
He nodded, something settling in him at that, the coif finally stilling in his hands. The large soldier cleared his throat then, apparently deciding the reunion had reached a natural pause.
"Excuse my rudeness Ser, but are you the one they call The Braver?"
He said it a tone of a man who was skeptical. His eyes moved between the runes on the exposed part of my sword in the scabbard at my hip and the monster head hanging from Epine's saddle with the expression of someone whose skepticism was losing a fight with what his eyes were telling him.
"That lad has been talking anyone within spitting distance's ears off since he joined the group this morning," he continued, nodding toward Aldric, who had the decency to look only slightly embarrassed about this. "A golden knight with a magic sword killing an army of bandits single handed, leaving nothing but ashes in his wake." He paused. "No offence ser, I didn't put much stock in it at first. Boys tell tall tales and travelers embroider things, that's just the way of it."
He looked at the forktail head again.
"But those runes," he said, gesturing to the runes visible on the exposed part of sword. "And that." He gestured toward the bundle at Epine's side. "That's a Wyverns head if I've ever seen one." He was wrong but I didn't see the need to correct him. "So is it true Sir? Are you him? The Braver, the Ash-Walker?"
Aldric, for his part, was watching me with the bright expectant expression of someone whose account of events was in the process of being vindicated in real time and was very much enjoying it.
Syanna said nothing. I could feel her looking at me with that quiet contained amusement at the reveal of my apparently spreading epithet. I glanced at her before returning my gaze to the soldier.
"The Braver...a child gave me that name," I said. "Over a foxtail weed."
A brief silence followed that, the merchant, who had been listening with increasing interest from behind his cart, was the one who broke it.
"If what the boy has said is true, about your magic sword..." he said, stepping forward with the careful diplomacy of a man used to negotiation, "then couldn't you deal with it ser? The troll, I mean."
The other travellers shifted. Not forward exactly, but the quality of their attention sharpened, the collective posture of people who had been waiting in the rain long enough to pin their hopes on whatever had just ridden up.
Aldric said nothing but his expectant expression was eloquent enough.
With a sigh, I opened my mouth, to accept, if only to pass, before I was interrupted.
"He'll do it," Syanna said, from beside me. Then, before the merchant and soldiers could exhale in relief, she added, "For a price."
I looked at her.
She looked back at me with perfect composure. "You have expenses," she said simply. "We both do. And these people have been standing here for hours waiting for someone capable to come along." She glanced at the merchant, then at the travelers, and soldiers then back at me. "That someone has arrived. It seems reasonable that his time is worth something."
"She's not wrong," the large soldier said, with an agreeing tone.
I considered arguing the point. Decided against it. She was, irritatingly, correct on both counts. "What are you carrying," I said to the merchant.
He straightened, shifting into the practiced posture of a man who negotiated for a living. "Spices mostly ser, from the Red Port. Some preserved goods. And fresh fruit and vegetables, I was going to sell them to the garrison here."
"I have need for good food, for fresh produce" I said. "Salted goods can only be stomached for so long." I glanced at Syanna, who had the contained expression of someone watching a plan she had set in motion proceed exactly as intended. "My ward, Lady Syanna Lyssene, will negotiate with you. She seems better suited."
The merchant looked at Syanna again, differently this time. His earlier instinctive skepticism at being asked to conduct business with a teenage girl in borrowed clothes had vanished with the revelation of her title.
The negotiation that followed was not brief.
The merchant opened at a figure that was optimistic by any reasonable measure, citing the quality of his goods, the length of his wait, and the general inconvenience of the morning with equal emphasis. Syanna listened to all of it without interrupting, which appeared to unsettle him more than argument would have. When he finished she was quiet for a moment, as though considering it seriously, and then suggested a counter figure that was low enough to make him splutter.
They went back and forth. The merchant grew red faced. Syanna remained entirely placid, the serene immovability of someone who had nothing to lose and knew it. When he attempted to dig in she turned to the large soldier with a pleasant expression.
"The garrison's supply problem would also be resolved if the bridge were passable again," she said. "It seems reasonable they contribute something to making that happen, don't you think."
The large soldier looked at his companion. His companion looked at the sky with the expression of a man calculating how much trouble this would cause him and arriving at a figure he found acceptable.
"I am sure the commander could authorize a small disbursement...Mi' Lady" he said, with a careful tone.
The merchant, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, arrived at a figure that satisfied no one completely, which I am learning was generally the sign of a fair arrangement. The other travelers contributed modestly and without being asked.
Aldric reached into his coat and produced two coins with a solemn expression.
"You don't have to," I told him.
"I know Ser, but this isn't for the toll." he said, and held them out anyway.
I took them.
Syanna caught my eye as I pocketed the coin. The look on her face was not quite smug. It was something adjacent to smug, refined by enough self awareness to stop just short of it.
"You were going to do it for nothing," she said, quietly enough that only I could hear it.
"I was considering the situation," I said, even I did not believe the lie.
"You were going to do it for nothing," she repeated.
I dismounted and turned toward the bridge before she could see my expression confirm it. I took off my cloak, folding it across Epine's saddle, and ignored the ripple of reaction that moved through the gathered group at the sight of my skin in the flat grey daylight. "Stay here," I said.
She opened her mouth, to argue most likely. "Stay here Syanna." I repeated a bit more sternly.
She closed it. Then after a beat, "I would stay behind you. Squires accompany their knights and I've faced worse than a troll."
"If you're referring to me, that's not the reassurance you think it is," I said. "Stay here."
She held my gaze for a moment with the expression she wore when she was calculating whether a battle was worth having. She concluded it wasn't. Not this one, or at least not here.
"Fine," she said, with a tone that communicated exactly how fine it wasn't, and looked pointedly at the middle distance.
I handed Epine's reins to Aldric, who accepted them with great seriousness. "W-what about your armour ser?" the first soldier-I really should have asked for their names- asked.
I glanced back at the plates still wrapped across Bran's back. "If that thing clips me properly armour isn't doing much to stop the damage," I said. "And hopefully I won't need it."
I started toward the bridge.
Behind me I heard the merchant's voice, dropped to the conspiratorial murmur of a man who believed he was being quiet. "Did you see the color of him?"
"Hard to miss," his son said.
"I thought it was the light at first," the merchant continued, with on his hushed tone.
"But it isn't the light is it. He's like that all over."
"Seems so."
A pause.
"And his eyes," the merchant said. "Did you see his eyes?"
"Father."
"I'm just saying, there's something not right about—"
"Father." His son's voice was patient and firm in the way of someone who had significant practice at this particular task. "The man is walking toward a troll on our behalf. Perhaps now is not the moment."
A short silence.
"You're right," the merchant said, in the tone of a man who had not actually changed his opinion but had decided to store it for later. "You're absolutely right."
Another pause. "Still though, looks like a specter he does." he muttered.
The bridge was pale stone over dark rushing water, the arch beneath it throwing a deep shadow across the river, and impossibly beneath it, a platform from what looked like crushed boulders. The smell was considerably stronger now. So was the snoring, low and tuneless and entirely unbothered by the world above it.
I walked toward it.
Authors Note: I was scratching my head trying to find a believable way for Matthias's epithets to spread throughout the world, and in the end I just settled on good old fashioned gossip. People talk, travelers carry stories. Don't think too hard about it. I certainly didn't. The point is he has a cool title now and it would be a waste to keep it in a nowhere village in Angren.
As for the chapter title, hardcore Witcher fans will probably recognise it as a play on words from a quest from The Witcher 2, specifically Troll Trouble, I've never actually played it myself but I came across it while researching trolls for this chapter and thought it was too neat a fit to pass up.
On the Patreon front, I'm proud to say both Frozen Blood and Chrome and Flame are now two full chapters ahead, so if you want to read ahead that's where to go. And a genuine heartfelt shout out to everyone who's already subscribed over there, you lot are a big part of why I've been pushing so hard to get these chapters out consistently. It means more than I can easily say.
As always please leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed it, and criticisms are welcome, the comment section is not just for compliments.
See you in the next one.