baptism of fire excerpt

[dragonlady7]

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Yes yes, I’m reading the Witcher books, when I can get them from the library. They’re fine, amusing in places, sometimes enamored of their own cleverness; the whole thing is a pastiche of the fairy-tale genre but there are a lot of good character beats nonetheless. But of course, this book is the best one, because we meet the hansa. I’ve seen some of these excerpts, wherein Geralt is sulking over having given an impassioned speech that they were to leave him alone to meet his terrible fate, and all of them laughed at him. But I liked this bit especially:

“How could he get it?” Milva said, grimacing. “He’s just ‘me, me, by myself, all alone’. A lone wolf! But you can see he’s no hunter, that he’s a stranger to the forest. Wolves don’t hunt alone! Never! A lone wolf, ha, what twaddle, foolish townie nonsense. But he doesn’t understand that.”

“Oh, he does, he does,” Regis cut in, smiling through pursed lips, as was his custom.

“He only looks stupid,” Dandelion confirmed. “But I do keep hoping he’ll finally decide to strain his grey matter. Perhaps he’ll come to some useful conclusions. Perhaps he’ll realise the only activity that’s worth doing alone is wanking.” (Your picture was not posted)