However, Vilgefortz’s magic is too strong, and he then attempts to impregnate her to get the prophesied child. Ciri eventually escapes, but is forced to rove through time and space as she attempts to undo the magical barrier holding her beyond the Tower, and is only able to make it back to her own time thanks to the intervention of Nimue and Condwiramurs.Įverything comes to a head when Ciri willingly goes to confront Vilgefortz, and attempts to sell herself in place of Yennefer. She was effectively held by a race of elves who wanted her to produce a child, who was prophesied to become the most powerful magic user of all time, and who would prevent the end of the world.

We also get to see what happened when Ciri went through the portal in the Tower of the Swallow at the end of the last book – in short, it wasn’t good. We jump to see what Geralt and co are up to, as they spend the winter in the Duchy of Toussaint, and we actually get Geralt being a witcher once more in these portions, which is nice because he hasn’t done his actual job since the very first anthology, as far as I recall. Similar to the last book, in fact more so than the last book, the timeline is pretty much all over the place, as Sapkowski appears to delight in using all manner of framing stories-within framing stories, so we start off with Ciri arriving in the time of King Arthur and telling her story to Sir Galahad, but then we go off on tangents with the sorceress Nimue and her protégé Condwiramurs (more Arthurian nods) trying to work out the end of the Ciri legend, based on the wealth of material that had sprung up since.

The conclusion to the epic of Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer and all the rest of it comes in the longest novel of the series, as we see pretty much all of the plot threads going right back to the short story anthologies being tied up.

The lady of the lake sapkowski novel