Rhenawedd Lysenne
The Silver Spoon, Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor, Temeria
1253
The door had scarcely closed behind us before Matthias crossed to the windows.
He pulled the curtains apart just enough to inspect the narrow courtyard below without exposing himself to anyone who might be watching from the opposite rooftops, tested the latch, then pressed two fingers against the wooden frame and went completely still. His head angled toward the glass in the way it did when his attention had extended somewhere my own senses could not follow.
I set my mask on the nearest table and waited.
"Nothing out of place," he said eventually.
"Enormously comforting," I said sarcastically. "For a moment I feared you intended to dismantle the walls."
His eyes moved briefly toward the panelling. "You can never be too sure."
I looked at him properly then, in the better light of the sitting room, and what I saw made me set the violin case down with rather more care than his attempt at a joke deserved.
I untied my own mask and dropped it on the table beside his. "Matthias." I kept my voice level, because the alternative was sharper than the situation had yet earned. "Tell me what is going on."
He removed his gloves, finger by finger, and placed them on the table between the chairs. Then he lowered himself into the seat nearest the dead hearth with the controlled ease of someone choosing stillness very deliberately.
"Matthias." I sharpened his name the second time, enough that my mood was unmistakable. "You promised me no secrets."
"Like you and the pendant?" The question arrived without heat, which made it considerably more effective than if he had been angry about it. I felt the response I had been assembling lose some of its certainty.
"That is not the same thing," I said.
"Is it not?"
"I was not keeping secrets," I said, and the irritation that had been building since the horse ride home finally found enough room to move. "I wanted to help. I wanted to contribute something that did not involve standing behind you while you handled every problem we encountered, and I did not tell you because I knew exactly what you would say and I did not want to hear it." I held his gaze across the table.
"I need you tell me things like this Syanna." He said
"I am your ward, Matthias not your prisoner you can not expect me to report every decision to you before I make it, especially if I mean to help us."
He looked at me for a moment without responding.
"If you had told me," he said choosing his words carefully, "I might have recognized what we were walking into before we walked into it."
"And would you allowed me to go?"
A pause. "No."
"Then I am not certain your hypothetical informed decision and my actual outcome are as different as you are suggesting," I said. "I am here. I am unharmed. Whatever happened in that room with Lady Orla is clearly something you intend to tell me eventually or you would have done what you always do and cut me of, so tell me." I sat down in the chair across from him, pulled the oilcloth bundle from my inner pocket, and set it on the table between us. "Who is she? What is she? What role does she play in my future?"
He looked at the pendant on the table.
Then he exhaled, slowly, through his nose. "Orianna," he said. "That is her real name. Lady Orla is what she is calling herself in this city." He paused. "She is a vampire."
The word settled into the room with the quiet certainty of something that did not need repeating.
From below came the ordinary sounds of the inn arranging itself for the night, boots crossing floorboards, someone laughing near the kitchens, the distant percussion of crockery being stacked. Unremarkable, unhurried, entirely indifferent to what had just been said in this room.
I looked at him.
"A vampire," I said.
"Yes, fortunately not a True Higher one." The answer remained irritatingly calm, as though he had told me Lady Orla collected rare birds or possessed an unfortunate enthusiasm for imported perfumes.
He continued on "Though unfortunately she is old friends with at least two of them."
"What kind of vampire is she?"
"A Bruxa."
The word belonged to stories told beside nursery fires, usually by servants who wanted children to stop wandering near the vineyards after sunset. Beautiful women singing beside ruined towers, hunters found bloodless beneath trees and lonely men following voices no one else could hear.
I had always assumed such tales existed because drunken men required more flattering explanations for disappearing into forests.
"What does that mean beyond the unpleasant stories?" I asked.
Matthias rested one forearm against the arm of his chair, his attention moving briefly toward the curtained window before returning to me. His fingers tapped once against the wood.
"Bruxae are among the most dangerous vampires that can still be killed conventionally," he said. "Assuming the person attempting it is a Witcher, or incredibly lucky."
He leaned farther back, his gaze drifting toward the dead hearth "I may be misremembering some of the finer details, but I know they can turn invisible and move so silently they could even catch a Witcher by surprise. They are fast enough to cross a room before most people recognise they have moved and strong enough to tear a fully armoured knight apart without requiring much effort."
I glanced toward the empty space near the curtains before good sense could stop me. Matthias noticed, though he spared me the indignity of commenting upon it.
"As though that were not excessive enough," he continued, "their voices can produce enough force to rupture eardrums, shatter weaker structures and send a grown man flying across a room. They can also influence people through dreams and nightmares, and communicate directly into another person's mind across short distances."
The woman from the masquerade returned to me in pieces: black silk moving soundlessly across polished floors, pale fingers resting against the stem of a wine glass and the unnerving ease with which an entire room had adjusted itself around her. Nothing about Orla--Orianna-- had suggested a creature capable of ripping apart an man, although I supposed that was precisely what made her so dangerous.
My eyes moved across Matthias's face, searching again for an injury I might somehow have overlooked beneath the candlelight.
"Is she stronger than you?" The question emerged more hesitantly than I would have preferred.
Matthias stared at me for half a second before a quiet, disbelieving sound escaped him, somewhere between a snort and the beginning of laughter. "There are very few things in this world capable of hurting me, Syanna," he said, the faint amusement lingering around his mouth. "Orianna is not one of them."
His certainty should have sounded arrogant, but I had seen what he was capable of.
"Then why were you so concerned?"
"Like I said, Orianna herself was never the problem." The amusement faded as he glanced toward the Heart resting between us. "My concern is that she has longstanding relationships with at least two true higher vampires, and I have no reliable way of knowing how they would react if she disappeared."
"So she is a vampire...you still haven't told me how you knew about the pendant."
"Orianna has a penchant for the arts and hosting these soirées," he explained smoothly. "In the future, she moves to Toussaint under the guise of a widowed noblewoman. It was on such a night that the Duchess of Beauclair and Geralt of Rivia secure an invitation."
"Geralt of Rivia? Where have I heard that name before?"
"A renowned Witcher," he replied, leaning back. "The Butcher of Blaviken, and the one who not too long ago broke the Strigga curse plaguing Princess Adda , as I was saying, at the time, the duchy was being...will be? Terrorised by an elusive killer. Geralt was deep on the hunt for this Beast, chasing a bloody trail of high-profile targets across the city. His leads eventually pointed him toward an infamous professional thief known only as 'The Cintran.' The man had been hired by a shadowy conspiracy, sent on a high-stakes heist to infiltrate an elite masquerade ball and retrieve a pendant."
"Beast?" I ask at the strange weight he put behind the word.
"The Beast of Beuclair is the name the city gave the killer, a True vampire being blackmailed to go on a killing spree. Geralt finds that 'the Cintran', after strangling the woman he used to gain access to the ball, eventually does find and attempt to steal the pendant. But unfortunately for him, our dear guest catches him in the act... I'm sure you can guess how that ended."
He paused a bit, running his hand through his messy hair before continuing on.
"The Cintran thought he was dealing with an ordinary, fragile aristocrat. Instead, he found himself trapped in a locked room with an ancient predator. When the witcher finally discovered the body, the thief had been defenestrated, hurled violently through the second-story window to break upon the stone terrace below, his throat torn completely to pieces...after some investigation and questioning, it comes to light that Orianna bought the pendant from a young woman...you."
...
"Is this why you do not want me to sell the Heart?" The question left me as little more than a whisper, the answer already assembling itself before he could give it. "Because some alternate, hypothetical version of me causes the death of a woman trying to get it back?"
He looked at me, a confused look on his face "What? No--"
Something cracked open in my chest, something that had been sitting there since the sitting room, since the pendant on the table, since the careful way he had looked at it rather than at me when he explained what Orianna was.
"What is the point of any of this?" I said cutting him off. "What is the point," I said again, and my voice had found an edge I had not entirely intended, "of you telling me to truthful, if you cannot extend the same courtesy to me? What is the point of all of it, the conversations, the road, the weeks of you treating me like someone worth investing in, if the moment my choices seem as though they would lead somewhere you do not like you simply step in front of them and redirect me somewhere safer without telling me why?"
I was standing now, though I did not remember deciding to stand. "You cannot tell me that my choices matter and then systematically remove them every time they frighten you."
"Syanna--"
"You are terrified of what I might become." The words arrived already formed. "I have seen it, like you are waiting to see which direction I am going to fall in, like you are still not entirely sure the answer is going to be the right one." I looked at him across the table, across the pendant and what it represented.
"You want me to be better, but you will not let me try, what is the point of this if you're going to be standing over me for every choice I make, that isn't trust. It is control dressed up as concern, and I will not live like that."
The room was very quiet.
"...That isn't why I didn't want you to sell it." He said into the silence of our suite.
"Do not lie to me, why else would you object to us getting more coin, you said it yourself that no harm would come to me for selling it to her." I objected.
"Because you do not want to sell it." was his calm response, the certainty in his voice irritated me almost immediately.
"You cannot possibly know that."
"You carried that thing while being dragged across half of the Continent in chains, you never bargained with it even the torment and starvation they put you through, even when you all but pleaded for me to take care of you, you never attempted to pay me off with it, even if you try and push the feelings away, it still means something to you."
My eyes involuntarily travelled to where the pendant lay on the table, it's shape clear even when bundled, I looked away from it toward the hearth.
A few weak embers remained beneath the ash, their glow too faint to warm the room but bright enough to cast a dull red line across the iron grate. The fire had been dying since before we entered, yet I found myself watching it as though its collapse required my full attention.
"And I know you would regret parting with it for such a stupid reason." He finished.
"Stupid?"
"You are not a burden, Sylvia." He said.
My head shot up at him calling me by my name.
"I do not know what I have done to make you feel that way," Matthias continued, his dark eyes unwavering. "To make you believe that because I can survive without many ordinary comforts, every room, meal, or piece of clothing purchased for you belongs in some private ledger that must eventually be balanced, but they do not."
He placed his hands on his knees, leaning slightly closer. "I made you a promise, Sylvia. I promised that I would take care of you, and that I would train you so you could take care of yourself. I intend to keep that word. You did not manipulate me into making it. You did not trick me, nor did you corner me into it. I made that choice entirely on my own, I'm not keeping score"
Matthias sat across from me in his shirtsleeves, mask discarded, his pale hair now tidy from where he had repeatedly run his hands through it in frustration. There was no pity in his face--which I would have rejected out of spite--and no reverence for the pendant as some sacred noble relic whose value rested entirely in the family that had cast me out.
He cared because he knew ,despite my attempts to pretend otherwise, I cared.
"You don't need to part with the Heart," he said softly. "especially when you have already proven tonight that you can help us earn what we need without doing so."
Slowly, he stood up from his chair. He moved with a quiet deliberation, kneeling on the floor directly before me. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, his posture tightening, before he reluctantly placed his cold hand on top of my folded hands.
I was about to ask why before I felt a tear roll down my cheek.
"Look... am I actively trying to stop you from becoming the worst version of you?" he said, the bluntness striking through the heavy air. "Yes. Of course I am. I have seen what it cost you to get to this point, and I know exactly what the road ahead of you looks like. I am not going to sit here and pretend that none of that is a future I want to avoid." He did not look away, forcing me to meet his gaze.
"But I do not want you to feel like I am judging every choice you make against some blueprint of what you could have become, I am sorry I made you feel that way."
"Have, not just could?" I asked, the words leaving me in a quiet, trembling whisper.
Matthias blinked, a shadow of uncertainty crossing his features. "What do you mean?"
"All of these coincidences," I said, my voice growing tighter as the weight of the realization began to press down on my chest. "What if they aren't just coincidences at all? What if it's not a matter of what I could become, but what I will?" His expression grew still.
The final ember surrendered beneath the ash, leaving the hearth dark except for a faint trace of smoke winding upward through the chimney.
"What if there are choices we are always going to make," I continued, lowering my voice as the room settled into the colder darkness left behind by the fire. "People we are always going to meet, objects that will always pass into the same hands, regardless of how many smaller details change along the way."
Matthias did not interrupt.
"What if there is a path waiting for me," I said, "and everything I call a decision is only another turn that eventually brings me back to it? What if I am completely destined to become whoever it is you saw? To do whatever it is you are so terrifyingly avoidant on telling me that she does?"
I pulled my hands slightly against his cold grip, looking down at the dead embers.
"It feels like there's already a track laid out in the mud," I murmured, the despair seeping into my words. "And no matter which way I turn my head, I'm just marching down it anyway. If some other version of me crosses half the Continent just to hand a piece of my past to a monster... and even with your intervention, I almost still did the exact same thing tonight... is there even a choice? Or am I just acting out a script someone else wrote?"
Matthias remained quiet for several moments, his hands falling away from mine as he paused to parse my worry rather than answering too quickly.
"In my world, there were stories about people who were warned of futures they would spend their entire lives trying to escape, only to find that in attempting to avoid their fates they did the exact things that would secure it" he said. "It was supposed to show how some tragedies are unavoidable, that attempting to circumvent your destiny only made sure it arrived all the more quicker."
He rubbed one thumb slowly across the black ring on his finger, his expression distant enough that I knew he was seeing people whose names meant nothing here.
"I've always hated those stories, the nihilism always made me never to take them too seriously," he continued. "But, this isn't my world, and things like that are not just stories anymore... I cannot promise that destiny isn't a real force, Syanna. I cannot promise that there is no current beneath our feet, pushing us toward some shore neither of one us chose."
My throat tightened painfully at the admission, though his voice hardened before despair could settle around everything he had refused to promise.
"But a current only carries what floats, Sylvia. It only commands what surrenders to the pull if destiny has a script written for you, it is written by a world that doesn't know the first damn thing about who you actually are, a path laid out by someone else is just a trap with a destination, and you were never meant to be anyone's prisoner."
He stepped closer, not enough to crowd me, but enough that I could no longer mistake the conviction in his face for empty comfort.
"If there is a road ahead that you do not wish to take, then refuse it, even when the mud is deep and every easier path bends toward the same direction," he continued. "Walk into the trees, climb the ridge, cross the river against the current, or stand still until the world exhausts itself trying to push you."
A faint, humourless smile touched his mouth before disappearing beneath something steadier, warmer, and considerably more sincere than reassurance alone.
"Maybe destiny is real, Syanna, but so is defiance, and you are not anything if not defiant."
"You make it sound simple," I said, lifting one hand to wipe the moisture beneath my eye before more tears could fall any further could fall any farther.
"It isn't, it's probably going to be a long and difficult road, but I promised I would walk it with you until you're strong enough to walk it alone."
Before I could even begin to try and form a response to that, the space in front of me emptied beneath a rush of displaced air that disturbed the ash inside the hearth.
The adjoining door opened and closed so quickly that the latch barely had time to rattle before Matthias returned from his room.
He placed a narrow, leather-bound sheath upon the table beside the wrapped Heart, positioning it carefully enough that the two objects did not touch.
"I intended to give you this as a parting gift back in Dregsdon," he said, remaining beside the table while I stared at the weapon.
The sheath was dark brown leather, plain enough for travel but intricate enough to point to it's noble origin, the stitching along its edge had been done by someone who respected durability more than ornamentation.
I reached for it, feeling the balanced weight settle into my palm before I curled my fingers around the unadorned hilt.
The blade left the sheath on a clean metallic whisper, catching the lamplight through a pale reflection that lacked the warmer grey of polished steel.
"It is silver," Matthias said, watching my expression rather than the dagger as the familiar metal caught the candlelight between us. "It isn't a weapon for a common cutthroat. It is a weapon meant to slay monsters and right now, I want you to think of it as a reminder, to keep it as a reassurance of my promise to you, Syanna."
I stared down at the dagger for a long moment. In the flawless, pale mirror of the silver blade, my own teary-eyed reflection stared back at me, fractured by the dancing glow of the dying candles.
"Thank you, Matthias," I eventually whispered, my thumb brushing the edge of the hilt. "I think I will call it Aen'caerme."
Matthias tilted his head slightly, his brow furrowing in curiosity. "Aen...caerme? What does that mean? Elder Speech wasn't exactly a talent the House of De la Croix cultivated extensively."
"It means exactly what you told me to do," I said, looking up to meet his eyes with a sudden, sharp clarity. "To go against fate, to defy destiny."
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Author's Note: That's it for Chapter 26. Sorry this chapter took a little longer than usual, and that it ended up being shorter than some of the previous ones. I went back to edit Chapter 25, got slightly carried away, and eventually realized I had practically rewritten entire sections of it rather than making the few small changes I originally intended.
Let me know what you thought about the exchange between Matthias and Syanna in this chapter. I wanted their argument to feel natural, but I struggled a little with finding the correct balance between anger, vulnerability and the larger questions they were discussing.
The main thing I wanted to explore was how Syanna might feel after realizing that Matthias sometimes treats her more like a project he needs to fix than a person capable of making her own decisions. Even though his intentions are good, constantly comparing her choices to the woman she becomes in the future would understandably make her feel watched and judged.
There is also the question of destiny, and whether Syanna is truly capable of escaping the path Matthias remembers. She has already made different choices and met different people, yet she still somehow ended up carrying the Heart of Toussaint into Orianna's home. From Syanna's perspective, that raises the frightening possibility that she is only taking a different route toward the same destination.
That fear also connects directly to the Curse of the Black Sun. If destiny is real, then she has to wonder whether the curse and prophecy connected to it are real, or whether the cruelty Matthias remembers was created entirely by the way other people treated her.
Destiny plays a major role throughout The Witcher, so this was a conversation that needed to happen eventually. That being said, I do not want to give this story the Absolute Regression treatment and spend chapter after chapter focusing almost entirely on dialogue and introspection.
I have some more active and hopefully interesting material planned for Matthias next, so look forward to that.