WiC Reads: The Witcher Saga—Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski

Chapter Four

Action! Betrayal! Magic most foul! Last time I asked for some movement and this chapter I got it. The slow buildup paid off in an orgy of violence, in multiple locations at once!

The main action takes place on the island of Thanedd, where sorcerers and sorceresses have gathered to plot the course of the world. But by the end of the chapter, it’s easy to forget that it opens with the deaths of Codringher and Fenn, lawyers and information brokers who decided to join the great game just when the stakes were raised…and they couldn’t ante up.

That’s a fancy way of saying they’re both killed off at the top of the chapter, which is how Sapkowski signals that this is gonna be a big one. The action then moves to Thanedd, where Geralt wakes up after spending the night with Yennefer and goes to take a piss. Sapkowski has fun speculating on how things might have gone differently had Geralt not done this, or had he done that…but he does what he does, and that makes all the difference.

Geralt ends up stumbling into a coup being orchestrated by the sorceress Philippa Eilhart, who we met in a previous book. She and like-minded sorcerers and sorceresses are rebelling against what they see as an attempt to sell out the Northern Kingdoms to the Nilfgaardian Empire; Vilgefortz, who tried to sell Geralt on this very position the night prior, is at the head of this conspiracy.

Geralt doesn’t have all the information on what’s going down, so we piece it together with him. Philippa Eilhart has enlisted Redanian spymaster Dijkstra to help carry out her coup, while head sorceress Tissaia de Vries isn’t having any of this infighting. It’s a clever way to sell this sequence and it leads to some entertaining moments, like when Geralt fights his way past Dijkstra’s goons so he can get to Ciri and Yennefer, who are the only people he really cares about on the island. But it can also be confusing, especially when we leave Geralt’s perspective. There’s a part where Yennefer has Ciri give magical testimony in front of an assembled crowd of sorcerers and sorceresses, but Sapkowski doesn’t use Ciri’s name, so it took me a minute to understand what was even happening.

But those minor quibbles are overshadowed by some of the big dramatic set pieces, like Tissaia de Vries letting loose with a huge ball of fire and especially Vilgefortz handing Geralt his ass on a platter in the chapter’s climax. This chapter starts with a murder in the dark and ends with our hero on the edge of death. Turn the page! Turn the page!