Chapter 26 : THE SECOND AND THIRD ATTEMPTS
The drainage channels worked.
Aldric stood at the edge of the modified approach route, watching the last of the standing water flow away into the collection basins his construction crews had dug over the past month. The footing was still soft—the marsh bottom retained moisture that no amount of engineering could fully eliminate—but it was solid enough for coordinated movement.
"Better," Edvard said. His arm had healed cleanly, the scar tissue a pale line across his upper bicep. "Still not ideal, but better."
The second attempt launched at dawn on Day 655.
The fight lasted twenty minutes—longer than the first engagement, more controlled. The drainage had isolated the Matriarch from one of her subordinates, and the improved footing allowed the party to maintain formation under pressure. They drove her back through her territory, pressing the advantage each time she tried to disengage.
Then she reached the deep section.
The water there was unchanged—too extensive to drain, too deep to follow. The Matriarch retreated into the darkness beneath the surface and didn't resurface. The party held position for three hours, waiting for an opportunity that never came.
"We drove her off," Vek said. "That's progress."
"The core requires killing her," Aldric replied. "Not routing her. Second attempt fails at the final step."
He marked the notation in his tactical record: Approach improved. Endgame unchanged.
---
[Southern Marsh — Day 710]
The third attempt went wrong in the ambush phase.
Aldric had positioned scouts to confirm the subordinate Water Hags' locations before the engagement. The reports came back clean—one subordinate in the eastern section, one in the western, the Matriarch holding the center. Standard territorial distribution.
The reports were wrong.
A second subordinate emerged from the deep water on the southern approach—a position the scouts had cleared three hours earlier. She must have shifted after the confirmation, responding to some behavioral trigger Aldric hadn't accounted for.
Pol was in the approach corridor when she struck.
The young soldier—recruited six months ago, competent but still learning the rhythms of monster hunting—disappeared beneath the surface before anyone could reach him. The water churned for perhaps ten seconds. Then it went still.
"Pol!" Vek was already moving toward the disturbance, his weapon raised.
"Hold formation!" Aldric shouted. "She's baiting—"
The Matriarch emerged from the center position, capitalizing on the broken formation. Her strike caught Vek across the upper arm, the same location where Edvard had been wounded two months earlier. But Vek's injury was deeper—the claws had found bone.
The retreat was chaos.
Toma pulled Vek back while Edvard and Harren covered the withdrawal. The Matriarch didn't pursue—the same patient hunting behavior that had saved them in the first attempt. But the damage was done.
Pol was dead. Vek was bleeding from a wound that wouldn't stop.
---
[Keep Infirmary — Day 715]
Aldona worked with the surgical tools Aldric had commissioned two years ago—the first artifacts from the Sovereign Forge, the instruments that held their edge as if sharpening was their natural state. Her hands moved with the precise economy of someone who had spent a lifetime at the intersection of knowledge and desperation.
"The arm cannot be saved," she said. Her voice was steady, but something in her posture suggested the weight of delivering such news. "The infection has progressed too far. If I don't remove it, he dies within the week."
Aldric stood at the infirmary entrance, watching Vek lie unconscious on the treatment table. The proto-healing water—the same partial-charge liquid he'd used on Coën in the swamp—had kept Vek alive during the journey back. But it wasn't strong enough to repair what the Matriarch's claws had destroyed.
The Healing Fountain, he thought. If it were built, if it were operational, the water would have been strong enough.
But the Fountain wasn't built. The Matriarch core remained unsecured. And Vek was going to lose his arm because the timeline hadn't allowed for enough preparation.
"Do it," he said. "Save his life."
---
[Keep — Day 730]
Pol's name went on the wall beside Renk's—the second entry in a section that had been empty for three generations before Aldric started filling it.
Vek woke three days after the amputation. Aldric was in the infirmary when it happened, reviewing construction schedules while he waited for any change in the wounded soldier's condition.
"My lord." Vek's voice was rough from disuse, his eyes unfocused from the healing draughts Aldona had administered. He didn't look at his left side—the space where his arm had been.
"You're alive," Aldric said. "That's what matters."
"Pol?"
"He didn't make it."
Vek was quiet for a long moment. His right hand moved unconsciously toward his left shoulder, then stopped before it reached the bandaged stump.
"The Matriarch?"
"Still alive. Fourth attempt in two months."
Vek's eyes finally focused, meeting Aldric's directly. "I want to be there."
"You're missing an arm."
"I can still hold a sword. I can still watch a flank." His voice steadied. "Pol died because the scout reports were wrong. I can make sure that doesn't happen again."
Aldric studied the soldier—the determination beneath the pain, the refusal to accept that his usefulness had ended with his injury. It was the same quality he'd seen in Gavric when the smith offered his blood, in Coën when the Witcher rolled up his sleeve without being asked.
Loyalty that chooses, he thought. The most valuable kind.
"Rest," he said. "Recover. The fourth attempt is in eight weeks. If you can function by then, you'll be there."
---
[Keep Study — Night, Day 730]
Three hundred and sixty-five days remaining.
One year until the Fall of Cintra. The dread sense had shifted register—no longer the steady background pressure he'd grown accustomed to, but something more urgent, more immediate. Phase 2, the Architect's Knowledge suggested. Active Pressure.
Aldric sat at his desk, the Matriarch hunt notes spread before him, and calculated the cost of the failures.
Pol was dead. Vek had lost an arm. Edvard's wound had healed, but the scar remained. Three attempts, each one closer to success, each one extracting a price in blood and bone.
The fourth attempt would be different. He would lead it personally—not because he was the best fighter in the party, but because he was the most analytically accurate. Three attempts of data had revealed the Matriarch's behavioral patterns. He could predict her movements now, anticipate her responses, position himself at the critical engagement point where his knowledge mattered more than his combat skills.
The timeline does not have room for more failures, he wrote in his personal record. Fourth attempt: personal lead.
Outside, the barony continued its operations—training cohorts cycling through the Campus Invictus, Forge production maintaining equipment quality, the intelligence network tracking Nilfgaardian movements along the southern border. The machinery he'd built didn't stop while he mourned or planned.
But somewhere in the marsh, the Matriarch waited. And in 365 days, something worse than a Water Hag would cross the southern horizon.
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