It behoves me to write about one more thing: what exactly happened to Menno Coehoorn himself at the Battle of Brenna no one knows. Some say: he fell and his body, unrecognised, was buried in a common grave. Others say: he escaped with his life, but fearing imperial wrath did not return to Nilfgaard, but hid in Brokilon among the dryads, and there became a hermit, letting his beard grow down to the ground. And there shortly after expired amidst his worries.

A story circulates among simple folk that the marshal returned at night to the Brenna battlefield and walked among the burial mounds, wailing ‘Give me back my legions!’, until finally he hanged himself on an aspen spike on the hill, called Gibbet Hill because of that. And at night one can happen upon the ghost of the celebrated marshal among other apparitions that commonly haunt the battlefield.

‘Grandfather Jarre! Grandfather Jarre!’

Jarre raised his head from his papers and adjusted his spectacles, which were slipping down his sweaty nose.

‘Grandfather Jarre!’ his youngest granddaughter shouted in the upper register. She was a determined and bright six-year-old, who, thank the Gods, had taken more after her mother, Jarre’s daughter, than his lethargic son-in-law.

‘Grandfather Jarre! Grandmother Lucienne told me to tell you that that’s enough for today of that layabout scribbling and that tea’s on the table!’

Jarre meticulously assembled the written sheets and corked the inkwell. Pain throbbed in the stump of his arm. The weather’s changing, he thought. There’ll be rain.

‘Grandfather Jaaaaarre!’

‘I’m coming, Ciri. I’m coming.’

It was already well after midnight before they had dealt with the last casualties. They carried out the final operations by artificial light–first from an ordinary lamp and later using magic. Marti Sodergren recovered after the crisis she had undergone and, although as pale as death, stiff and as unnatural in her movements as a golem, used her magic competently and effectively.

The night was black when they exited the tent, and all four of them sat down, leaning against the canvas.

The plain was full of fires. Various fires–the stationary fires of camps and the moving flames of torches. The night resounded with distant song, chanting, shouts and cheers.

The night around them was also alive with the intermittent cries and groans of the wounded. The pleading and sighs of the dying. They didn’t hear it. They had become accustomed to the sounds of suffering and dying, and those sounds were ordinary, natural to them, as integrated into the night as the croaking of frogs in the marshes by the River Chotla or the singing of cicadas in the acacia trees by Golden Pond.

Marti Sodergren sat in lyrical silence resting on the halfling’s shoulder. Iola and Shani, indifferent, cuddling one another, snorted from time to time with completely nonsensical laughter.