After dinner the benches scraped and the last of the bowls were stacked in a tottering tower that only Rina dared to trust. The dwarves had long since retreated to their blankets and their snores—sturdy, professional snores—rose from the gatehouse like a chorus of blacksmiths idling. Wind combed snow along the inner bailey. The hall settled: logs sighed, a dog thumped an ear in its sleep, and the drip in the north wall resumed its measured practice of counting winters.
They sat as witchers and as something else besides—mothers and wards, strays who had decided not to stray, men who had learned to keep silence and now found speech useful. Vesemir poured a final finger of wine, then another, because austerity is a virtue best practiced while planning and not when the throat is dry. Berengar carved an apple with the amused fastidiousness of a man who refuses to let fruit be a metaphor for anything. Lembert had fallen asleep against the settle, clutching his carved horse in a fist that could throttle nightmares. Visenna mended a cuff and pretended not to listen while listening to every breath.
Geralt set his mug down carefully, as if he were placing a marker on a map. He looked at the faces he trusted enough to keep unmasked.
"They hate us," he said without throat-clearing, because the obvious need not be announced as novelty. "They always have. If they don't say it with torches, they say it with prices. They wave when wolves come down from the ridge, and spit when the wolves are gone and the wool counts up short. We went to them with the world's ugliness folded into contracts, and they paid us for the courtesy of not having to look at it. Then they called us monsters for taking the coin."
There was grumbling at that—low, dry, the sort that wears a man down more than shouting does. Vesemir lifted two fingers. The grumbling remembered its manners.
Geralt went on with the calm of a man who had argued with himself to a draw before bringing the matter to council. "I'm done handing them my back so they can decide whether to stab or slap it. In this world I care for two things: my mother's breath, and this school's stones. Call it selfishness if you need a priest to say a prayer over it. I call it choosing what my life buys. I will not be the sword arm of a city that remembers me only when something bites it on the arse. I will not be a sacrificial goat at strangers' shrines. I will not die to decorate some lord's conscience. And if any saint takes offense, he can come down and discuss it over soup and a ledger."
Vesemir's mouth twitched. In that twitch was a treatise on pride, and love, and the pragmatic limits of both. "Get to it," the old witcher said. "I hear a plan in there, skulking around like a cat that's stolen the cream."
"There's a plan," Geralt agreed. "Monster hunting buys us winters. It does not buy us futures." He let his eyes move from face to face. "After the thaw, we go down as a company. A mercenary company. Masks, assumed names. No medallions on the chest, no wolf heads at the throat. We choose the contracts. We make our own rules. We take coin for risk and coin for time, and for once in our lives we'll charge what the work is worth, not what the supplicant's tears can change in two heartbeats. We deal with merchants first—men who know sums better than sermons. We keep guards with better table manners than knights. And we keep this place—this school, this family—out of their mouths and their maps."
Berengar smirked over the apple. "A masked company, is it? We'll cut pretty figures. Do we dance at harvest balls too? I'm excellent at catching girls when they faint."
"We already wear masks," Geralt said. "Only difference is the ones I want will be made of leather and not expectations. We've got one thing the world can't pretend it doesn't need—competence. And another thing it fears too much to pay well for—our faces. So we'll sell the first without the second. We hide the medallions. We hide the eyes. We hide the training. We show them discipline, silence, and results. Let them guess what's under the hood while their caravans arrive on time and their children sleep through the night."
Eskel, who had been chewing a piece of straw he had found God knows where, took it out of his mouth to talk, because some ancient, decent part of him still believed courtesy should survive even in barns. "You'll have a name for this foolery."
"Romeld Company," Geralt said without hesitation. "It served us well once. It will again. The old letterhead still smells of fear—and relief. People remember relief fondly."
Visenna threaded her needle through with a bright, blunt comment. "Business means agreements, my son. Agreements mean men in ink-stained shirts who never had to scrub blood out of their sleeves. Have you decided who will speak to them? It won't be me. I will not argue with guild clerks at my age."
"Dick and Vicky have tongues that can walk across a river without getting wet," Berengar offered. "Let them talk us into coin while the rest of us pretend to be furniture with opinions."
"Vicky can do accounts, too," Vesemir said. "He's made a ledger prettier than some ballads. Won't keep us honest—but it will keep the money where we left it."
"And where will we leave it?" Rina said, appearing at Geralt's elbow with the implacable authority of a woman who has supplied soup to armies and told kings to wait their turn. "Not in a chest under the floorboards. Half the world has fingers nimble enough to learn that old tune."
"Vivaldi," Geralt said. "He knows the smell of my coin. He knows what silence pays for, and that we prefer it to taste. The bank will hold the chest. The chest will hold the signatures. The signatures will hold the company. We will not let some magistrate seize wages because a noble decided he wanted our patience as a dowry."
"So we don't trust kings," Eskel said. "Good. What do we trust?"
"We trust contracts," Geralt said. "We trust the kind that say what they mean, and charge extra when the wrong people read them. We trust masks. We trust time. We trust each other, and then only after we've woken up twice and realized we didn't dream it."
"Rules," Vesemir prompted. He didn't say, because he didn't need to, that the only difference between a band of blades and a pack of dogs is a list read aloud and agreed upon.
Geralt ticked them off on callused fingers. "First: no assassinations. We are not a knife in anyone's dark. Second: no slave-catching, no witch-burnings dressed up as 'pest control,' no 'clearances' that mean villages go missing. If a contract smells like blood that never dries, we feed it to a dog. Third: no crown work, unless it's convoy and openly bid. We won't be anyone's cloak. Fourth: when two sides in a border argument both want us, we take the job that leaves the most children sleeping in their own beds, not under carts. If that pays less, tough. We'll live with it."
"And the fifth?" Vesemir said, because lists with odd numbers sound like superstition and even numbers like law.
"Fifth," Geralt said, "we are mercenaries and not martyrs. We'll not throw our lives away to prove a point to people who aren't in the room. If a fight runs longer than the money, we make a new price or we walk."
Silence nodded. The fire leaned. Snow scratched the windows as if eavesdropping had become gauche and it wanted to do better.
"Work?" Berengar prodded. "What work? Don't say 'protection.' That's a shade of red most towns have too much of already."
Geralt smile‑grimaced the way he does when he's half darling and half dagger. "Protection, yes—but the kind men cry for when their wives are going to market. Convoy and camp. Security audits for warehouses that keep losing silk to mice with knives. Night watches for auctions that attract men who've practiced lifting more than cups. Rooting smugglers out of rivers where they aren't wanted—friends to the Honest Guilds, enemies of undercutters who stiff apprentices of wages. Arbitrage of fear. You know: all the things we've been doing for years for free when the contract says 'monster' and the real monster is a man with debts and poor imagination."
"And the other half?" Visenna asked, rolling a cuff that refused to learn humility. "Witchers are not accountants by nature."
"We diversify," Geralt said. "We set men to work who aren't made for blades. Warehouse keepers. Runners. Scroll‑copyists who can forge a receipt better than the merchant expects and exactly as well as he wants. We buy a smithy—from a dwarf we can trust—that makes hinges so honest a wind can't lie to them. We sponsor an apothecary who claims to hate us and sell him to every guild mistress who keeps a boy from dying by paying for a proper tonic. Each coin turns into three, one to pay the men, one to pay the house, one to pay the stubbornness of the future."
"And where?" Rina asked. "You've said merchants and banks as if cities are the same thing."
"Novigrad," Geralt said simply. "She cons the faithful and pays the faithless, and if you don't kiss her ring she pretends to like your hand anyway. There's enough coin there to build two lifetimes and a haven. It's a city that knows how to look the other way for a percentage. It respects masks, because all its citizens wear them. Our company will fit like a knife slipped into a well‑cut boot."
"Novigrad." Berengar whistled, low. "We'll need more than masks. We'll need saints, and Vivaldi, and a portreeve who owes us for keeping rats out of his flour."
"We'll need people," Geralt said, and now his voice acquired the particular quiet that makes a room attend. "Not just blades. Hands. Minds. Scribes. Porters. Runners who can lie without learning to. And I say we start with those the city refuses to see. Elves."
The word arrived like a stray dog—cautious, lean, asking whether the bowl on the step was for it or for someone's conscience. A few shoulders stiffened; years had taught them what banners look like when banners aren't cloth at all. Geralt waited for the room to admit its gut and then offered it a seat.
"They're turned away from counters because their ears make ink smudges on ledgers," he said. "They're made to stand outside walls they helped build. They're told to sing for their supper and sleep in the woods they used to call by their own names. We will give them shelters. We pay fair. We write rules that protect them when the city's rules don't. And we see if gratitude buys what bribery never could—loyalty."
"Loyalty," Vesemir murmured. "A pretty coin. Often counterfeit."
"We will bite it and then take it," Geralt said.
Geralt took the straw out of Eskel's hand and snapped it neatly in two. "We are not a banner. We are a business. Our house is neutral ground. We pay the tax we must, as quiet men do. We keep soldiers out of our storerooms and squirrels out of our books. If either side wants our help to spill the other's blood, they can shovel gold at someone else's door. If either wants bread and a night without knives, we slide a bowl across the counter and sell them the hours at cost. That is our politics: we sell time and safety to anyone who comes unarmed and pays in coin."
"And if coin isn't what they bring?" Visenna said, without looking up from the stitch that had learned, finally, that stubbornness is only attractive if it isn't stupid.
"Then we return what they brought." Geralt's tone went mild the way snow looks soft until a man tries to sleep in it. "No sermon. No outrage. Just simple accounting. They give us trouble, we return interest."
Berengar flicked a look at Vesemir. "He's serious."
"He is," Vesemir agreed. His eyes went to the lintel over the door, the one he had fixed himself with a stubborn wedge when the hinge had proved more principled than the beam. "He is also right."
Rina crossed her arms. "What about the children? You'll be off playing at masks while we play at mothers and fathers."
Geralt turned to her with a respect that softened nothing. "The children stay. They learn sums before they learn steel. They learn how to stand in a shop and say 'no' in a way that makes a man apologize to his own hat. They learn how to boil a pot so it does not boil over. They learn, Rina. And the company pays their bread out of its first chest. It pays the dwarves. It pays the mason's thumb when the hammer misses. It pays for the wood that doesn't rot and for the geese that tell us when men come who have forgotten why they came. Our wild days end at the keep's threshold. We can strut in town as wolves in velvet if we must. We do not bring the act home."
"We'll set aliases," Geralt said. "Simple, sturdy names. We'll agree on them. We'll wear the same masks in the same streets until people greet the masks politely and stop searching the eyes. We will not be found by the things that hunt witchers, because witchers will be hunting coin in wool cloaks with company pins that look like the kind of clever a merchant thinks he invented."
"We'll need a sign," Vicky said from the bench against the wall, raising a hand because school never quite leaves a boy and the right habits keep a room honest. "For the company. People like to point at a thing and call it 'ours.'"
"Black thread on gray cloth," Geralt said, after a heartbeat. "A knot only a careful eye spots. It tells those who can see that we are precise. It tells those who cannot that we are polite. It tells the ones who'd set a trap that we've already seen it."
"And a motto?" Berengar grinned. "Every respectable gang of thugs has one."
"'We finish,'" Vesemir said unexpectedly. The words sat heavy on the oak. "We begin what we can end, and we end what we begin."
They kept that, because sometimes the old man is the only man in the room who remembers how to make a sentence that isn't ashamed of itself.
"If we do this," Geralt said, "then we do it like civilized people. We draw up papers. We decide shares. We decide what a week costs and what a wound costs and what a funeral costs if we ever need to lay one out. We decide what's paid to the keep each quarter, and it is paid first. We decide who signs in town and who signs here. We decide who can say 'yes' when the price goes up and who can say 'no' when a man starts believing his purse is a wand."
They talked then of details, because all noble schemes die on the hill of particulars. Of masks: leather, plain, fitted; the eyes shadowed but not blind, the nose free because men who cannot smell cannot survive in streets as well as in forests. Of pins: a stitch, not a brooch, iron not silver, because silver is for monsters and for men who mistake themselves for kings. Of wagons: two to begin, built with hidden compartments and honest wheels. Of bunkhouses: one near the docks, another near the grain market, each with doors that don't gossip and windows that expect trouble.
Of time: winter for building in stone and on paper, spring for putting boots on the road to Novigrad, summer for making the company's name mean what they wanted it to: a task taken, a task done, masks that didn't slip because they were worn by men who no longer thought their faces were arguments they had to win every room with.
When words finally ran out, as they do even in halls used to bearing them, they rose and stood a while, each man feeling his own weight settle in his knees and find a different balance there. Vesemir banked the fire with the care some men reserve for gravedigging. Berengar tucked a blanket over Lembert and moved his carved horse out of the draught. Eskel stretched until the bones across his chest cracked like burning twigs and grinned at the ache.
Geralt went to the door, lifted the bar, and stepped into the courtyard. Snow lit the night enough that a man could pretend the world was kind if he were tired and wanted to get away with it. The dwarves snored on, professional as ever. The walls held. The keep, old and obstinate and grateful in its own fashion, breathed.
Visenna came to stand beside him. She said nothing. She did not have to.
"You'll make a fine merchant," she said at last, when silence had proved it could be trusted with the secret of being interrupted now and then.
"I'll make a fine liar," he said, and his smile was tired and real. "But for once, for the right reasons."
"Then let's lie well," she said. "For the children. For the winter. For the walls."
"For the family," he said.
And if the word sat oddly on a man like him, well, the bench had learned his shape tonight, and the keep, which knows more than men suspect and tells less than women fear, approved. In the morning, the dwarves would wake and curse the stones into obedience again. The witchers would train, and the children would argue over the circumference of soup bowls as if it were a problem mathematics had invented just to make them ornery. And after the thaw, masks would be cut, contracts inked, and Novigrad—vain, venal, necessary—would meet a company that finished what it started, and never once showed its teeth unless the price made it seem impolite not to.