Chapter 12

Letho had seen just about everything life could throw at a man, but he rarely met children who behaved so oddly. This boy did not flinch at Witchers, nor did he back away like most folks when they met them.

That was no small thing. Plenty of children melted into tears at a Witcher’s strange features and unsettling air.

Roy, however, showed no revulsion. When he looked at the three Witchers, his gaze was ... unexpectedly warm, edged with something like familiarity, even admiration.

Maybe age made a man sentimental, Letho thought for a moment, then pushed the thought away; his face reverted to that long-practiced, deadpan mask. Still, the boy’s look nagged at him, tugging Eetho’s memory loose. He remembered being a child himself, taken from Gulete to Gorthur Gvaed in Tir Tochair, the Viper School’s stronghold.

Back then he had watched his mentor, the founder Ivar Evil-Eye, stand on a high dais and teach a dozen young Viper apprentices about swordplay and survival. He had once looked up at that man with the same wide-eyed wonder Roy now displayed.

Time had not been kind. Decades ago Ivar vanished while hunting a Winged Brain Eater. Then, when certain Cat School Witchers went mad and slaughtered civilians, Witchers took a beating in the public eye. The Viper School splintered; fewer and fewer came to Gvaed to apprentice. Now the Viper name was nearly a ruin, the three before Roy among the few left, two others wandering unknown. In the last twenty years the school had produced no survivor of the Trial of the Grasses.

Reviving the Viper School, avenging their enemies, finding Ivar Evil-Eye, that was Letho’s deepest wish and the reason they had come north. Thinking that, his look toward Roy softened.

...

If the gods favor you, the sun shone bright that day. The three Witchers made careful preparations before they moved out, work no ordinary villager could mimic. They poured an amber, viscous fluid from a vial onto the blades they usually wore at their chests, spreading it slowly, every motion deliberate and taut with purpose. Then they checked the potion belt, counted alchemical bombs, strapped small glass phials where they could reach them in an instant.