Geralt worked in silence, for the most part bent over the corpse, back to Nina as pale hands worked with certainty, no shake, no anger. He tied the steel chain's length around the man, his wrists, crossed over his torso, braided around the legs and feet with the weight to the bottom. The surf would wash away any blood. The fish and lamprey would eat the corpse.

"For some time," he said. There had been anger like Nina described behind the words once, but it had fled. Geralt could no longer hold onto his anger well, it faded quickly to something else. Whether it was his growing age or the mutations, he couldn't know and thought about only infrequently.

"I hunted a man. He was an elf once, but only a monster by the time we'd crossed paths. There's more to the story, more by far than I could ever mention in any conversation, but -- he'd hurt my family. He'd taken me, and stolen all of my memory and most of my self, and he'd turned me into one of his men. Made me a monster, a slaver, and a murderer of innocents. He stole any sense of peace from my daughter, and he slew the man who was like my father. So I hunted him down and I killed him on Bald Mountain."

Geralt was not an assassin, not a murderer. But his anger had been a dark thing in his chest, and he had surely murderer Imlerith. And he was angry too that the elf had pushed him to that.

He felt for Inej. In the way that someone could only feel for another when they are also, in part, mourning for a bit of themselves.

"I'll be back," he said. He turned to look at Nina, eyes swamped with pupil, before picking the body up again, moving into the water slowly to not get bowled over in the night surf.