Sleeping Beauty Reloaded

Chapter 16 - The Witcher’s Return to Pontar Valley

Meanwhile, Geralt of Rivia continued his journey through the hills on the aerdinish side of the Farrar down towards the Pontar valley. Before Midville, he had crossed the border between Temeria and Aedirn at Flotsam.

Usually in that backwater town business was good. That was important since his light coin purse had been mocking him since Vyzima. But first, the trading post’s commander, Lorado had let him wait for hours and then told him the troll was mending their bridge and therefore a protected citizen. Of the human citizens, not so many were blessed with the leisure and funds to visit a tavern on a Tuesday evening. He had won the man-to-man fistfight in the tavern on the first floor with ease and doubled his remaining coin. But by the time he had stabled Roach, the sterner and therefore more lucrative options for bare knuckle fighting had decided to call it a night.

He ate dinner and paid for a straw bag under the tavern’s roof. The attic was better than the surrounding swamps, but the heated business in the brothel on ground level did not suit his refined senses and general insomnia. The competition was spending wisely. They preferred to flatten the whores over being flattened by a witcher. 12 Orens was an affordable tariff to get laid in a real bed – he could tell there was one because the damn thing was cracking rhythmically.

The next morning, on top of his sexual frustration, one of Lorado’s goons had showed up and required a fee from the witcher before he was even allowed to get down to business in the city of Flotsam. That was why he left it to the town to adjust the monster business themselves. Riding through the eastern gate and passing the fisher’s huts outside the fortifications, a woman surrounded by a bunch of children ran after him once he had chosen the narrow road into the woods in direction of Aedirn. Many children cried when they spotted his mutated, scarred looks and yellow eyes. But few people went that way from Flotsam these days, which was the last Temerian outpost. It was a dangerous path through the woodland to the closest Aedirnish settlements.

The mother of ten offered up her last coppers and asked the witcher to inquire for her husband, a tinkerer who had travelled in that direction he was going. The witcher asked why she was worried and she told him of a new danger, reports of a monster on the Aedirnish side of that wood Lorado had ‘forgotten’ to mention. The witcher denied taking her coppers. Monsters, elven arrows, wild boars… the path was dangerous and most dangers were no witcher business. Geralt did not accept advance payment out of principle and he could not afford to spend orens on travelling to return for her coppers.

Geralt thanked her for the information and memorized the tinkerer’s name in return.

The man’s name had been listed in the steward’s dead book and he was buried on the graveyard in a row with the guardsmen. The witcher had added to the steward’s book the information where the travelling tinkerer came from, but the Temerian royal mail was not working over the border and far westwards travel had ceased for the time being.

Following the information of the tinkerer’s wife, he had inquired at the local feudal lord, taken the contract on the leshen for 500 Novigrad crowns, a hard currency of the value of 6.5 Orens. He had also insisted on free quarter because a leshen usually took some time to be found. With the quarter, he had gotten more than he had bargained for. The bed was harder than the worn out straw mattress in Flotsam but he had been flattened by a lusty slave just after taking a closer look.

He had been in good hands. As usual he responded well to dire female need, his member stood tall in service and got worshipped every night of his stay. To put it in relation, two full nights in Flotsam’s brothel would have cost as much as the count had paid for her. Four nights between her thighs had purged the witcher’s frustration, but that did not mark her his property. Velita cared for him, yet she was self sufficient and he preferred it that way. He had given the guide ten percent of his earnings to share among them. That would be enough to buy her, to free her or at least keep her safe.

On an intellectual base he had made a fair deal. On a physical base, her scent was still on his blanket as he unrolled it in his encampment. Geralt had unloaded the donkey that was carrying just the opposite of fire wood. He had lit a small fire in a hollow in the ground. The cut leshen root made a good armrest. He nudged the ends of the branches into the embers every now and then to keep the flames in the center burning.

If he had brought Velita out here, her butt would be sore from riding, her teeth would clatter and she would feel utterly miserable. His common sense insisted that he was better off in her heated saddle chamber. The witcher rose just to remove the empty feedbags from his mare and the donkey, let them graze while he ate the remains of the lunch package and reclined against Roach’s saddle. The blanket around his shoulder was warm, like the acceptance and trust Velita had extended to him.

Fog rose from the wide Pontar valley and gathered over the backwaters and swamps that accompanied the big stream. The cover of white merged with the trees of the marshland forest below. Some mile away he spotted lights moving in the fog. He was not afraid; his encampment was on the safe side. Another business option had just presented itself. The witcher was spotting and would inquire in the next village if there was demand for the removal of Foglets.

Foglets were dangerous creatures who used their light to lure people in the swamp to drown and eat the cadaver in the following weeks or even hid in the fog to kill their unsuspecting victims with their claws. Peasants often accepted that swamps were taboo at night time and did not react on the treat until a main road was concerned. The dark season approached. If they wanted him to take care of that problem, the fee for killing a Foglets were 50 crowns or 325 orens in local currency, that wasn’t small change for a village.

But most farmers would pay gladly the value of four pigs to avoid losing a son who occasionally missed the main road on the way home from the tavern after they ploughed the fields all day. Or a belated daughter gathering blueberries and mushrooms in the adjoining forests. As Gernot had described, not only the fields were valuable for the peasants, the surrounding forest was also used intensely. Compared to a forester guarding the woods for local nobility and taking freedoms at times, foglets were merciless, greedy killers.

A witcher was no white knight when it came to issues among humans. He was not one of them. There was no looking back for him. He had to stay impartial and unemotional to travel freely, cross the countless borders all over the continent and be welcome under the eyes of any local authority to take out the dangerous monsters who threatened hapless humans with their super human powers.