Crossroads of Ravens

The ninth installment in The Witcher series, set in a medieval fantasy world of humans, elves, dwarves, and dangerous monsters, follows Geralt as a young witcher, a magically mutated monster hunter, during his first year on the road after leaving the witcher stronghold of Kaer Morhen in the Kingdom of Kaedwen.

Geralt kills a marauding deserter while defending a peasant and his daughter, only to be arrested in Neuhold and sentenced to hang by a vengeful captain. Preston Holt, an older, white-haired witcher, intervenes with a devastating magical Sign that throws a soldier from his saddle. The two ride out together.

Holt tests Geralt by sending him alone into a flooded silver mine to fight cynocephaly, small dog-headed creatures, on a fabricated rescue mission. He proposes a partnership: Geralt will succeed him, using Holt's reputation and estate, Rocamora, as a home base. At Rocamora, Holt trains Geralt in hand-to-hand combat targeting the skull's vulnerable points, using a key as a concealed weapon. They spar with oaken staves, and Holt demonstrates a lethal fencing combination of a mandritto (forehand cut), molinetto (circular flourish), and tramazzone (backhand cut), but withholds the defense. In mid-May, Geralt departs and meets Holt's agent, Timur Voronoff, in Belvoir, who formalizes the financial arrangements.

Geralt's early solo contracts prove formative. He barely survives a zorril, a lizard-like predator, prevailing largely by luck. He kills a kikimore, a bog-dwelling monster, and a giant aepyornis, a rare terror-bird. His horse is stolen, forcing him to buy a chestnut mare he names Roach.

At the temple of the Goddess Melitele, the high priestess known as the Mother Assumpta reveals that in 1194, a pamphlet titled The Description of a Monstrum or a Witcher incited a mob to attack Kaer Morhen. Eight witchers defended the stronghold, not the legendary seven. The four final defenders cast a combined Sign of fatal power, killing the attackers but dying themselves. The eighth witcher, then known as Reyndert the Wraith, was found at a distance, wounded while fleeing. That man is Preston Holt. The Assumpta warns Geralt to leave Holt and find his own path.

In Glass Mountain, a burgomeister's family is being consumed by a living black slime, a curse cast by a woman whose son the burgomeister drunkenly trampled to death. Geralt kills the caster through a specific ritual, saving the burgomeister, his wife, and their two older children, but the town credits a priest's prayers and pays almost nothing.

Estevan Trillo da Cunha, the royal Prefect of the Guard, tries to recruit Geralt as an informant against Holt, accusing Holt of murdering three leaders of the 1194 attack. Geralt refuses. Elena Fiachra de Mersault, the Upper March's security commandant, overrides the prefect and escorts Geralt to Brunanburh Castle to disenchant a striga, a cursed girl transformed into a monstrous ghoul. During the fight, Geralt's Sign fails and panic overwhelms him; he decapitates the striga instead of breaking the spell. De Mersault reveals that Margrave Lindenbrog planned to cast out his wife, Deianira, and her daughter in favor of the young guest, so they cursed the girl through their weaving. De Mersault controls the narrative to protect Geralt, but the margrave pays nothing.

Over winter at Rocamora, Holt tells Geralt how witchers were created: Sorcerers built superhumans for military use, a renegade stole the technology and founded the witcher schools, but the mutation trials grew increasingly lethal before being stopped. In Holt's library, Geralt discovers a copy of the pamphlet bearing a heraldic martlet, a bird emblem he will encounter again. In spring, Holt abruptly ends the partnership and orders Geralt to leave.

On the island of Seevalk, Geralt is hired to deal with a vodnik, a harmless frog-like creature, but is drawn into a family conflict. Count Frederik Vaikinen holds his sister Ludmilla prisoner to prevent her from eloping with Redfern Finnegan, scion of a rival house. Frederik secretly orders Geralt to murder the captured Redfern. Instead, Geralt conspires with Seneschal Diego Mars and the healer Vrai Natteravn, a capable enchantress, to spirit the lovers away. Vrai gives Geralt a teleportation talisman: a disc with a heliodor stone that, pressed three times, will summon her for emergency aid.

At Xendell, a cider estate, Geralt meets Artamon of Asguth, Dean of the Academy of Magic in Ban Ard, whose coat of arms bears the same martlet birds. After a cordial meeting, Geralt hides and overhears Artamon ordering his agents Meritxell, Beauregard Frick, and Cibor Ponti to poison Holt, murder the temple priestesses, and vivisect Geralt. Geralt kills Artamon using the bare-handed techniques Holt taught him: a punch to the Adam's apple followed by a blow to the mastoid process, the bone behind the ear, rupturing the vertebral artery.

The investigation is quashed under pressure from Dowager Marchioness Cervia Herrada Graffiacane, Artamon's lover of over 60 years, who redirects the inquiry toward Holt. Holt voluntarily surrenders, confessing to all the murders to protect Geralt. Geralt rides to the prison to confess, but da Cunha refuses: Holt's confession matches the autopsy, and the legal machinery cannot reverse itself. Holt is executed by garroting; the veiled marchioness shrieks with laughter as he dies. Da Cunha banishes Geralt from Kaedwen but quietly leaves Holt's body unguarded at dawn. Geralt buries his mentor beneath a yew tree.

Defying his banishment, Geralt rides north to protect the temple. On the eve of the autumn equinox, Meritxell's party captures him, beats him with iron-bound cudgels, and hauls his bleeding body to the temple gate as bait. As the gate opens, Geralt presses the heliodor stone three times. Vrai teleports in and drives off the attackers with a spell of stinging magical light. Geralt spends 13 weeks bedridden and months recovering.

Before departing, the priestess Nenneke reveals the marchioness's backstory: Her son, actually Artamon's bastard, was killed by a man rumored to be a witcher, sparking the vendetta that produced the pamphlet and the attack on Kaer Morhen. The Mother Assumpta, troubled by disturbing visions, refuses to see Geralt but sends a message: "You are at a crossroads." Nenneke advises that revenge brings joy only to vapid minds, then adds: "kill those fuckers."

Geralt collects Holt's swords and a posthumous letter from Voronoff. The letter reveals that Holt engineered their meeting and taught Geralt killing techniques to use him against Artamon, then expelled Geralt to save him from becoming a tool for murder. Sketched on the back are stick figures demonstrating the defense against the deadly fencing sequence: the secret Holt withheld in life. In Ard Carraigh, Geralt infiltrates the Graffiacane palazzo by night and dangles a wolf medallion before the sleeping marchioness; she wakes in terror and dies of apparent heart failure.

Geralt hunts the remaining assailants across multiple kingdoms under the name Esau Kelly. He strangles Cibor Ponti in the port of Piana. In Oxenfurt, Beauregard Frick attacks with the same mandritto-molinetto-tramazzone sequence. Using the defense from Holt's sketches, Geralt steps inside the arc of the blow and drives his sword's crossguard through Frick's eye socket.

Geralt finally reaches the ocean. At a coastal settlement, he spots Meritxell preparing to flee by sea, but she escapes. A scolopendromorph, a giant segmented predator, crawls from the forest toward children playing on sand. Geralt dismounts, choosing the children over revenge, and draws Holt's silver sword. The witcher walks toward the monster as the wind blows from the sea and grasshoppers scatter before him.