How the bloody hell do I get myself out of this pickle now?

After five days of trekking with the Riverdellian forest beekeepers they finally emerged from the wilderness onto a boggy reed bed. It stopped raining, the wind dispersed the mists and clammy fog, the sun broke through the clouds. And mountain peaks sparkled snow-white in the glare.

If a short while ago the River Yaruga had signified to them a clear dividing line, a border, the crossing of which represented an evident passage to the next, more serious, stage of the expedition, it was even more so now; the sense that they were approaching a limit, a barrier, a place which could only be turned back from. They all felt it, Geralt above all–it could only be thus, since from dawn to dusk they had been faced with a mighty, jagged range of mountains barring their way, rising up in front of them to the south, and gleaming with snow and glaciers. The Amell Mountains. And rising even above the saw-toothed Amell was the forbiddingly majestic obelisk of Mount Gorgon, Devil Mountain, as angular as the blade of a misericorde. They did not talk about it, didn’t discuss it, but Geralt felt what everybody was thinking. For when he looked at the Amell range and Gorgon, the thought of continuing the journey southwards seemed sheer insanity.

Fortunately, it suddenly turned out there would be no need to head south.

This news was brought to them by the shaggy forest beekeeper, owing to whom they had acted as the train’s armed escort for the previous five days. The husband and father of the comely hamadryads, next to whom he looked like a wild boar beside two mares. He who had tried to deceive them by saying the druids of Caed Dhu had gone to the Slopes.

It was the day after their arrival in Riedbrune, a town teeming like an anthill and the destination of the forest beekeepers and trappers from Riverdell. It was the day after parting with the forest beekeepers, for whom the Witcher was no longer needed. He hadn’t expected to see any of them again. His astonishment was thus all the greater.

For the forest beekeeper began with effusive expressions of gratitude and the handing to Geralt of a full pouch of mainly small change; his witcher’s fee. He accepted it, feeling on him the somewhat mocking gaze of Regis and Cahir, to whom he had occasionally moaned during the trek about human ingratitude and stressed the pointlessness and stupidity of selfless altruism.

And then the excited beekeeper literally shouted out the news. ‘The, you know, Mistletoers, I mean the druids, are camped, dear Master Witcher, in the oak groves by Loch Monduirn, a lake, get my drift, thirty-five miles from here in a westerly direction.’