The road was white stone and black mud where the thaw chewed through the frost, all ruts and slicks and the churn of wheels that had passed weeks before with luckier skies. Geralt watched it from a low ridge the color of old bone, snow clinging like cobwebs to the scrub, wind sliding off the slope in thin, glassy breaths. He had not taken this track to be heroic; he took it because the ridge gave him angles, because the ravine below funneled the world into a place where a single man's decisions mattered, because the cart down there—half-ditched and blocked by a hacked-down pine—was loud with a scene that always ended in the same way unless a blade intervened.
He saw the merchant first: a middle-aged man kneeling with his wrists tied, head pulled down by the back of his hair. He saw the daughter next: pale cloak mud-streaked, bodice ripped, mouth clenched shut with the kind of training born in a house where women share a language men never learn. He saw seven deserters, perhaps eight if the one by the pine counted for more than his own wheeze—patchwork armor, stolen coats, the swagger of men who had survived just long enough to mistake luck for talent.
Geralt adjusted the strap at his hip and felt the familiar pressure of the scabbard place itself correctly against his thigh. The sword rode where knights wear them: angled for a draw that reads as ceremony until it flashes into honesty. He never wore blades on his back—not in this life, not in this role. The sky was a thin pewter; the ground smelled of brutalized pine and old blood; the wind carried the sound of someone making laughter from a place where no laughter belonged.
He stepped down the slope without hurry, making himself exactly the sound a man in plate would want to make: the deliberate clink, the soft clash of leather on metal, the cadence of a gait that thinks it owns the ground. He had polished the breastplate with ash and water to dull its shine; he had stitched a plain field-blue surcoat over the mail and drove a simple needlework knot at the heart. His helm's nasal threw shadow over his eyes and lowered his voice when he spoke. He had used this guise before—in coin halls, in beacheside courts, in churchyards where priest-kings liked the smell of steel.
"Ho there," he called, not loud, just sure. "Make way on the king's road."
Three heads turned, then five, then all. A man in a red-slashed coat spat and swaggered forward with a grin so heavy it should have made his face ache. "King's road," he echoed. "You see a king here?"
"I see a tree where it wasn't yesterday," Geralt said, letting his eyes move everywhere and his feet move nowhere. "And a man with rope where hands should be. And a girl whose only crime is someone else's hunger."
"Girl's no girl," the red-slashed man said. "Woman enough to—"
Geralt did not let him finish. Words spent wrong can turn a fight into a mob. He drew on the inhale, blade clearing scabbard with a hush and a bright, bleak line of clean. No flourish. His first cut was the kind a butcher knows and a duelist forgets: short work at the wrist, the red-slashed man's sword-hand in the snow before his mouth could catch up to the pain, the second cut a clean crescent through the man's throat so his friends had two sounds to be confused by—metal on snow, voice on wind, both too late.
"Two left, two right," Geralt said, as if he were teaching them their own fate. Then he moved.
He did not use signs. No swelling of air, no flash of fire, no shield of shimmering light. He had not needed them for months now for this kind of work, and he would not need them here. He had trained for two years in the keep and then three in the world; he had learned that everything fast is slow first, that everything loud starts quiet. He took the next man in the groin with a shove of the hilt—knights do not waste edges where a pommel speaks more plainly—then cut behind the knee to deny the lunge to his right. The deserter screamed, which worked nearly as well as death in the moment; the scream turned two heads that should have watched their own hands.
The pair at the cart split badly: one went for the girl, the other for the merchant. Geralt pivoted left, boot-slick in mud, grounded through his hip and cut for the man's jaw—missed by the width of a coin on purpose, because the man flinched backwards as bullies do when the world stops tolerating them. The next slice was a draw-cut that opened the cheek to bone and convinced the deserter he loved his own face too much to put it in reach again. Geralt had no time for the lecture his eyes wanted to give; he kicked the man in the chest, let him skid, and went on.
The one at the merchant had a knife set for a throat cut done lazy. Geralt lifted his sword in a line that promised something bigger than it delivered, and when the knife went high to meet it, he switched hands—left to right across his own belly, blade near-flat, inside-out, a move that looks clumsy until it licks a forearm open to the tendons that make fingers forget their plans. The knife fell. The rope did not. Geralt's elbow did the rest, hard into a temple, and the man went out like a light that never learned how to burn right.
Two more came on from the pine with a fury that made them brave and blind. Geralt gave ground not because he needed it but because he knew how to make gravel lie about a man's balance. He let them come into the wheels' ruts and slid to the side so the first tripped on the second's certainty. One fell; the other found his spine bent exactly where a boot wants it. Geralt's sword punched under the floating ribs with the cruel honesty of work done correctly—he did not twist; he did not make the man suffer a lesson no one learns at that speed. Steel in, steel out, breath in, breath out, the world already turning to the next fact.
Three left, he counted—one by the girl, two at the felled pine, hands fumbling with crossbows they should have primed before they staged their little theater. The one by the girl had his hand tangled in her hair. Geralt did not run; running would have made the shot true for the men at the pine. He walked and then stepped and then stopped with a stillness so complete that even the knots in the felled tree seemed embarrassed to exist. The man by the girl hissed something he thought would make him feel in charge. Geralt's blade went across his forearms as he raised them, drawing two lines that a surgeon would admire for their neatness, and then the flat of the blade cuffed the man's temple so he slumped with his hands bleeding in his lap like a boy after a lesson on knives.
The crossbows thumped. One bolt went wide; the other hit Geralt's mail on the shoulder and stuck like a conversation he had not time for. He let the pain be a fact, not a decision. He counted steps and closed in, making the distance short enough that a second shot would only shred sleeves. The nearer crossbowman tried to draw a hatchet, which was commendable ambition applied in the wrong decade of his life. Geralt took the wrist, guided it to the cart's plank, and pinned it there with the hatchet itself. The last man backed up into the tree he had felled as if it had reversed time to ruin him personally. He swung his crossbow like a club. It was a poor club. Geralt took the bow, took the man's teeth with the bow, then shot the bolt into the mud to give the fellow a tune to leave the world by while he bled politely.
Silence arrived like a tired friend. The cart creaked as if to object. The merchant made a sound that had no words. The girl kept her jaw set until a breath came on its own without being ordered.
Geralt did not sheathe his sword. He did not kneel. He did not touch either of them. He moved to the one who had his hands in the girl's hair and rolled him away by the collar so his blood fertilized the ground somewhere that would not stain a life he had no right to touch.
"Untie him," Geralt said to the girl, voice low and unarguable. "Slow. Keep the ropes. They'll make good kindling."
She moved like a foal that remembered it had legs. The merchant's hands shook as rope fell; the girl's didn't. Geralt stood between them and the rest of the world and listened for men who might have heard the first throats open and found courage in numbers. The ravine carried nothing back to him but wind.
When the ropes were coiled and the merchant had figured out how to be a person who can stand again, Geralt moved through the deserters without ceremony. He put his blade where it needed to be. He did not linger. He did not pray. He killed them. They had been trying to rape a girl in front of her father. They had cut a tree into a road and called it providence. He felt no guilt. He did not count it as a service to the gods. It was maintenance.
He left two alive long enough to speak because he needed words to make a shape around the next hour. He dragged both by their collars out of the ruts and sat them where the pine's crown shadowed their faces into something smaller. He removed his helm, because a voice is a tool and faces are tools and he needed the right tool for this work.
"You deserted," he said. "You robbed a road. You tried to rape a man's daughter and make him watch. You've earned everything that follows. Do you want the road here to be a place mothers tell their children to fear forever? Do you want the soldiers you fled to come and find this campfire and make the nearest village your grave because someone told someone who told someone else?"
One tried courage and found it sour in his mouth. "You can't—"
Geralt drove the tip of the sword into the pine beside the man's ear. The two flinched together like fish trying to become birds.
"You will stop breathing in sixty breaths," Geralt said gently. "Before that, you will tell me if there are any camps within a mile. You will tell me if anyone else knows you planned this ambush. You will tell me yes to both, or no to both, and you will choose the truth because I am too tired to waste time digging in the wrong place."
"No camps," the first said. The second nodded too fast. Geralt watched their eyes. He had learned enough in three years to know where lies grow. He believed them, not because they were brave but because they were too stupid to invent geography on the spot.
He finished it. He cleaned his sword on a sleeve that had taken more than it gave. He moved to the cart, walked its length, checked the axles, the wheel-nails, the bucket of grease knocked over in the ditch. He righted the bucket with the same care he had put into breaking a jaw. He cut the pine in three places with ten strokes and rolled the sections out of the road. He threw the deserters' gear onto a heap that would become a pyre. He kicked snow over blood where it pooled deep enough to freeze into language.
When he spoke to the merchant, his voice was the one he kept for men who could command coin and therefore had learned to command themselves. "Your name," he said.
"Orlan," the man said, relief doing its ugly work in his face. "Orlan Mett. Of—"
"No villages," Geralt said. "Not yet."
Orlan nodded as if a tutor had rapped his knuckles. He steadied himself on the cart. "Sir knight," he said, and Geralt let the lie stand, because he had put effort into it, "I… I owe—"
"You owe no words here," Geralt said. He looked to the girl. "Your name."
She had found her own breath. "Mila," she said.
"Good," Geralt said. "Mila, you are going to take your father's hand and sit with him by the wheel. You are going to drink water. Do not be sick if you can help it. It will take things from you that you should keep. Breathe. I am going to make a fire that will take the rest of this away from anyone with curiosity and a horse."
"Sir," Orlan said hoarsely. "We should tell—"
"No," Geralt said, and the word was so flat it might have been a plank you lay over a hole you want to forget. "You will not tell anyone. You will not weep this into a tavern floor with ale. You will not whisper it into your pillow. If you do, if they trace it back to you, to here, they will call you accomplices to murder. They will call you the ones who lured soldiers to their deaths. They will say you paid me. And if they don't, the ones with friends among these men will come for you because my face will be gone and yours will be the only ones that remain."
He let that sit. He watched them absorb it, the way a stove absorbs heat until it radiates on its own. Orlan nodded first, because men like him had learned quickly that survival depends on whether they can believe ugly truths in time. Mila nodded second, not because she liked what he said but because she knew the smell of lies and this wasn't it.
"Who are you?" she asked finally.
"Aurther," he said. He had used the name often enough that it sat on his tongue like an old coin. He put the helm back on so he could be exactly the stranger she needed him to be.
The pyre was work. He dragged bodies, piled gear, opened chests, found a ledger, and tossed it into the core where it would burn hottest. He found a crude little medallion carved with a griffin that had perhaps once been honor and was now only theft; he broke it with a boot-heel. He stacked pine like lessons: heavy first, kindling second, air where it needed to be, draft the way the ravine would want to feed it. He struck flint, caught it in a twist of dry bark he had cut weeks ago and carried in a pocket because men romanticize luck when they should invent it. The fire took, argued, accepted its job.
He stood while it burned. He wanted no wolves tonight, no crows teaching muddy children what meat looks like. Smoke laid gray stripes across the ravine. A bolt hissed inside the fire as the glue let go and something split. Mila startled; Orlan steadied her with the hand Geralt had told her to take. Geralt did not speak until the worst of the black went to gray and the smell changed from bodies to ash.
"Now," he said, "we leave. Slow. Not in a column. One wheel in snow, one in mud, so no one will read your trip as a song they can sing to find you. You will stop a mile on, you will sleep where the road bends and you can see both directions. You will tell no one. If someone asks why your axle creaks, you will tell them you did not grease it because you are new to the road. Be new to the road until you are home."
Orlan put a hand to his mouth as if he wanted to make a promise it would take his teeth to chew. "Sir Aurther," he said into his palm. "Will you… do you… is there a way to repay—"
"No," Geralt said again, and this time the word sounded almost kind. "You will arrive at your house with your daughter, and that will be the only accounting anyone needs."
He stepped aside to give them the road. Mila paused beside the fire. He saw the calculation moving behind her eyes: the old math of rage and shame and the ways a person can make themselves a future out of a moment like this. She lifted her chin. "Thank you," she said, and made it not a debt but a description.
Geralt watched the cart grind out of the ravine, watched the char and ash settle, watched the snow begin to take it all back the way it does when it wants to pretend the world is new. He cleaned his blade in snow, not because it mattered but because he liked the way the cold made steel honest. He sheathed the sword at his hip. He checked his tracks and broke the obvious ones with boot-heels, then stepped in the cart's path where he could and off it where he should. He left the ravine by a different way than he came, because memory is a tool and he used it the way a mason uses a plumb line.
On the ridge again, he looked back once. The fire was low, the smoke lazy. His arm ached where the bolt had found the mail. He rolled the shoulder and let the pain be a kind of conversation with a day that had done what days do when you meet them with a blade.
No guilt. Not here. Deserters who make a woman's body the price of a road do not get the luxury of being someone else's moral exercise. He had lived long enough now to let some things be simple, and he had trained hard enough to make simple into an art. He did not pray for them. He did not curse them. He burned them so they could not be used again and he left.
He walked until the ridge gave him back to the world, until the sound of the ravine was only wind again. He took off the helm and let cold sting his scalp, watched his breath choose the air, and then put the helm back on because a wandering knight's work was not finished—someone else's tree would fall across someone else's road within the hour in a different story that did not yet know his name.
He called himself Aurther in the next village, in the ale he declined and the room he refused because he did not want their sheets to tell a better story than his own. He bought a twist of wire, two needles, three feet of waxed thread, a bit of lampblack for the strap he would retouch at the end of the week. He gave a boy a coin to carry a message that said nothing important to anyone but would update a friend in a cold keep that the roads were busy with men who did not deserve them. He left the village by a side lane and took the line of hedges to where the land buckled up into chalk and the world changed under his boots—a note in a long song, one more measure carried in a low voice.
By dawn he would be someone else again: perhaps a farmhand with a bandaged hand and a pack too neat for a boy who had only ever turned hay; perhaps a courtier's guard with a cheap spear and a good eye that doesn't tell anyone who trained it; perhaps no one at all, walking in the snow with a baker's bag on his shoulder because the best way to be left alone is to carry bread and smell like kindness.
But tonight, this was enough: a fire that did its job, a cart that would reach a town with two people speaking in the kitchen quietly about oatmeal and not the ravine, a sword at his hip that still believed in the hand that kept it, and a man with white hair walking under a sky that had earned the right to be left alone. He let the breath go. He let the work go. He let the world be just the sound of his own boots and the way cold makes a person honest with themselves.
Three years out of Kaer Morhen,years of training behind that, and a lifetime's worth of decisions packed into a road's width of morning. He had learned this much: good intentions were promises you make the day before a fight; consequences were the bill the day after. Today, the math had balanced in a way he could accept. He had not played the saint. He had not let a court write his ending. He had done a job that was there to do, the right way, once, without making it about anything except what lay in front of him.
He smiled, a small thing that no one else got to have, and took the next bend.