THIS IS MY GREAT, TERRIBLE DESPAIR

  THE WITCHER CANNOT ALWAYS TELL.  His world is flooded full with blood, with its pressure, its density, its speed. He cannot escape the sound, the smell, when he passes through the city.  The blood of lords and peasants, dogs and horses.  Black blood from the sickbeds and scaled blood drying on the flagstones, the thin blood of the starving and that robust, red blood of the working woman who cries out skillfully for her patron. He can hear her across the river. He can smell her aromatic cypher when he passes beneath the window.

   In an instant, the blood of the strzyga overflows his mouth again. By the time he releases her throat, she has retracted to the form of the cursed child, the little girl, eyes blue and pearled with pain. Bleeding. The bruxsa, the bożątko, the singing rusałka with her pale arms whose illusions fade in death to reveal her broken jaw, her shattered cheekbone, the burns from the ropes she was bound with. What of the blood of the bandit princess  —  running down her beautiful thighs?  White as snow.  And his hands that had parted them only the night before, his fingertips, his tongue. What of his blade that parts them now?

   The blood of the Witcher, draining down into his own eyes, drawn by a hail of stones, and the cries of the townsfolk. The stones  ---  a hail of thrown stones.

   When the Witcher passes by the front gate, the dogs in the yard recoil in fear. It is the death-scent heavy on him, his blood-scent.  Blood and blood and blood and blood.  The blood of monsters, the blood of beasts. The blood of men and corpses. A processional of murdered things has followed him since his second birth, bleeding all the way. The first in the line is him. Tubes tied into his veins  ;  seven days bound at the wrists and ankles on a rack, passing in and out of consciousness as easily as through a sheet of softly yielding rain. From one pain to another, screaming, weeping, seizing violently. A boy of ten, for seven days, flushed clean, replaced.  Is it even your blood? How can you tell?