The worst portal failure Geralt had witnessed—which had forever discouraged him from teleportation—had occurred at the beginning of his witcher career. At that time, a fashion for being transported from place to place had prevailed among the nouveaux riches, wealthy lordlings and gilded youth, and some sorcerers offered such entertainment for astronomical sums. One day—the Witcher happened to have been there—a teleportation enthusiast had appeared in a portal bisected precisely down the middle. He looked like an open double bass case. Then everything flopped out of him and poured down. Fascination with teleportals decreased perceptibly after that accident.

Compared to something like that, he thought, landing on a marsh was quite simply a luxury.

He still hadn’t fully regained his strength, was still experiencing dizziness and nausea. But there was no time to rest. He knew that portals left tracks and sorcerers had ways of tracking the path of the teleportal. Although if, as he suspected, there was a flaw in the portal, tracking his flight would be virtually impossible. But in any case, remaining for too long in the proximity of the landing place wouldn’t be prudent.

He set off at a brisk pace to get warm and loosen up. It began with the swords, he thought, splashing through a puddle. How had Dandelion expressed it? It’s a streak of bad luck and unlucky incidents. First, I lost the swords. It’s barely three weeks later, and now I’ve lost my mount. Roach, who I left in Pinetops, is sure to be eaten by wolves, presuming somebody doesn’t find and steal her. The swords, the horse. What next? I dread to think.

After an hour of traipsing through the marsh, he emerged onto drier ground, and after another hour happened upon a tramped down highway. And reached the crossroads after half an hour’s march along it.

* * *

A signpost stood at the crossroads, a post with planks nailed to it, indicating the four points of the compass. They had all been shat on by birds of passage and copiously dotted by crossbow bolt holes. It appeared that every traveller felt duty bound to shoot at the signpost. In order, then, to decipher the words, one had to approach quite close.

The Witcher went over. And decoded the directions. The plank pointing westwards—according to the position of the sun—bore the name of Chippira, and the opposite one pointed to Tegmond. The third plank indicated the way to Findetann, while the fourth God knew where, because someone had covered the lettering in pitch. In spite of that, Geralt already more or less knew where he was.