"Season of Storms" by Andrzej Sapkowski, summary

The plot unfolds between the events of the earlier Witcher novellas about Geralt, when the hero has already parted ways with the sorceress Yennefer, squandered his hard-earned coins, and unexpectedly lost his combat gear. The book was written in 2013.

This novel is the eighth in the "Witcher" series. Prior to this publication, the author released the short fiction collections "The Last Wish" and "The Sword of Destiny," as well as the novels "Blood of Elves," "Hour of Contempt," "Baptism of Fire," "The Tower of the Swallow," and "The Lady of the Lake."

Disappearance in Kerak

After slaying the spider-like monster, Geralt enters the coastal kingdom of Kerak. The official Albert Smulka has overcharged the royal treasury by thirty crowns, attempting to lure his guest into a bribery scheme. At the port guardhouse, burly guards demand that he hand over his weapons for safekeeping. In exchange, the receiver, Gonshorek, issues a paper. At the Natura Rerum tavern, the witcher spots the red-haired sorceress Litta Neid, nicknamed Coral, after which the guards immediately arrest the hunter on false charges of embezzlement. The court sets bail at five hundred crowns.

The bail was paid by an unknown benefactor. The witcher was left unarmed. A nasty thing comes to light at the guardhouse: the depository, Gonshorek, died suddenly of a heart attack, the receipt was confiscated along with his belongings, and the ledger contains a forged entry about the issuance of the blades to a scoundrel. In a fight with the bald-headed guards, Geralt is rescued by the arriving troubadour Dandelion and his cousin, the royal instigator Ferran de Lettenhove. A strange fact is revealed: Coral herself wrote a denunciation to King Belogun and then ransomed the prisoner for the sake of the secret plans of the sorcerer’s circle. Geralt peeks into the sorceress’s villa with a white freesia, immersing himself in a love affair. Litta performs a divination using a pool. A rock in the shape of a griffin, an auction of rarities, and a gold medallion with a heraldic dolphin appear on the surface of the water. Dandelion immediately recognizes the Griffin rock near the bandit fortification of Ravelin.

The crime boss Pyral Pratt is in charge there. To find out the way to the stolen goods, Geralt agrees to enter the arena bare-chested for the amusement of the local nobility. He stabs a ferocious vigilosaurus with an iron rod from a lampion. Pratt sets a date: the swords will be auctioned off on July 15th by the Borsodi brothers in Novigrad.

Behind the Scenes at Rissberg Castle

The witcher’s back has been lacerated by the barbed tails of a vigilosaurus, so Coral hastily stitches up the wounds and sends her lover to Rissberg Castle. The scientific citadel greets the stranger with the smell of ammonia. The ancient Grandmaster Ortolan, creator of an anti-aging elixir, berates the guest for killing rare mutants of the past. The sorcerers Pinetti and Harlan Tzara take Geralt to a locked room with model sailboats in bottles and display cases of tin soldiers. They offer a contract. In the surrounding forests, someone is brutally destroying settlements of woodcutters and charcoal burners, leaving pyramids of severed heads without a single surviving witness.

Mages suspect forbidden goetia. Geralt teleports daily into the forest thickets of the Tukai Mountains, meeting the royal constable, Frans Torqueville. In the Sosnitsa tract, the witcher finds the corpses of workers, a child torn in half, and the effeminate mage Sorel Degerlund with human intestines in his fist. Stepping closer, the hunter falls into a trap. Using his body tattoo, Degerlund transports the enemy to a secret lair and injects him with the venom of a white scorpion.

Paralysis paralyzes the body. The sadist admires himself for a long time, pacing before the motionless prisoner, accompanied by the purring of a black cat with a fluffy tail. The criminal confesses to the bloody massacres: the villages were decimated not by demons at all, but by hybrids of Bue and Bang created by Ortolan under the supervision of the crossbowman Pashtor, in order to imitate scientific achievements. Geralt gathers the remnants of his witcher forces, tranquilizes the scoundrel with the Somn sign, knocks out the hunchback with a tome, and forcibly activates the alien teleportation rune.

Skirmish in the swamps

The mutant, thrown from the portal, falls into a swamp. Wild Emblonia spreads out around him. Border guards led by Captain Shevlov capture the traveler, then break the cheap blade the poet bought from the false widow over his knee. Degerlund and his monsters then emerge from the spatial breach and wipe out the gang in seconds. Geralt manages to saddle the bandit Yula’s gray mare.

At the post station, he meets the bald-bearded dwarf Addario Bach, who plays the French horn in a miner’s orchestra. Together, they reach Vetrennaya Wharf, boarding the sloop "Prophet Lebed." The tanner Kevenard van Vliet confesses to the tragedy. The drunken merchant Parlagi strangled a kidnapped elven girl in his cabin, who had begun to transform into a fox. The enraged mother — an aguara werewolf — catches up with the fugitives among the overgrown backwaters, creating a haze of hissing snakes, false whirlpools, and ghostly refugee settlements. The greedy mercenary Fish escapes by boat, falling into the jaws of a crocodile and a snapping turtle.

Geralt hands the child’s body to a fox that steps onto the deck. The beast accepts the corpse, promising to return for revenge. The crew dives into the water after a mirage of a sandy beach, perishing in swarms of swamp leeches. Geralt, Addario, and the merchant escape on a miraculously intact boat. They only manage to reach Novigrad after the auction closes.

Reckoning at the Citadel

The streets of Kerak are in turmoil. Constable Torquil lies in a hovel, gravely wounded by Pasztor’s crossbow bolt. The local healer has already laid out his saws on the table to amputate his thigh. Geralt shoos the charlatan away with silver coins, pours a healing elixir on the wound, and hands the patient over to a herbalist. The old woman points to the location of caves near Mount Cremora.

The witcher searches for the werewolf Otto Dussart, once spared for his peaceful nature. The werewolf sniffs dozens of rock crevices for a long time, sifting out the scent of bats, badgers, and a sleeping gorgon. His keen sense of smell detects the scent of a house cat. Geralt enters the dungeons, where Bue and Bang are sharing a baked human leg.

A bloody battle ensued. A sharp Viroledan sword, gifted to Pinetti after fleeing Rissberg, slices through the bruisers’ tendons. Blinded, Bue accidentally cleaves off the scythe-like skull of his comrade, and the wolf Dussart, arriving just in time, rips out the throat of the treacherous crossbowman. In the laboratory, the witcher sees the preserved head of the sorcerer Tzara, the dismembered body of a girl, and a living prisoner in an iron cage. Degerlund attempts to hurl a fireball, but the steel slices through the sorcerer’s fingers. Geralt breaks the assassin’s neck vertebrae with his bare hands, under the watchful eye of the orphaned cat.

In Kerak Castle, the wedding of the old king and the young Ildiko Brekl is being prepared. Belogun openly banishes the heirs of Egmund and Xander, threatening to exile them on the ship Acherontia. The prince’s conspirators attempt to frame the witcher, forcing him to kill the guards outside the monarch’s bedchamber. Geralt eliminates the assassins Samsa, Tverdoruk, and Richter, rescuing Dandelion, who has been taken hostage. The king dons the dolphin amulet given to him by his bride; the enchanted chain instantly ties the ruler’s throat like a noose. His eldest son, Viraxas, triumphantly enters the throne room, having hired mercenaries in advance and taken the young widow for himself.

Tidal Wave and White Roses

A gigantic cyclone suddenly sweeps in from the sea. A twelve-meter-high wave crushes the shipyards, sinks battle galleons, and wipes out the impoverished city of Palmyra. Geralt, abandoning his jacket and sword on the terrace, dives into the swirling whirlpool to rescue children from a torn-off roof. Commandant Violetta pulls the exhausted hunter onto the stone slabs, while the bandit’s daughter, Anthea, perishes under a floating log. Coral cowardly teleports to the hill. Later, the sorceress returns with the bag, but is coldly rebuffed by her disappointed lover. The apprentice, Mosaic, decides to leave her mentor for Geralt.

At the "Under the Boar and the Stag" tavern, the travelers are blocked by the dangerous witcher Bregen of the School of the Cat, eager to claim the Vizima reward for the royal striga. The situation is resolved by the young wandering sorceress Tiziana Frevi. She hands Geralt an oblong package containing his authentic Mahakam blades, secretly purchased by Yennefer at the Novigrad auction through the banker Giancardi. Bregen cowardly hides the blade. At dawn, a transformed aguara appears before Geralt in the ruins of the garden, holding her rescued elven adopted daughter. The fox momentarily assumes the form of Yennefer, strewing the path with wild broom petals and reminding him of the illusory nature of human anxieties.

A century later, the young adept Nimue is walking through the Soykin Forest toward the island of Thanedd. In the thicket, a multi-legged arachnomorph, the product of ancient mage experiments, attacks her. A gray-haired warrior with two swords suddenly appears, chops the beast into pieces, cuts the copper tag from its shell, puts the girl to sleep with the sign of Somnus, and vanishes among the centuries-old oaks.