The Ones Who Had Loved Her The Most

The Long Road to Toussaint

Jenny was back on the family farm for the first time in seven years. The village of Toderas was the same as the day she had left it, the villagers too. She doubted it would change in the next fifty years even.

She was not home for the family visit she had planned and never done. She was here to bury her parents. The village priest had told her how they passed within a weak of each other, first her mother and then her father.

Jenny had cried her tears, placed flowers on their graves, and now stood in the yard of the old farm. Jenny had sold the cows and chickens, but she could not part with the land; instead, she let the property and cottage out to a newlywed couple.

All around her were the echoes of her childhood. She was born in the old barn on a dark and stormy night. Her birth mother, a stranger whose name she never knew, was buried beneath the oak tree behind the cottage, and now her parents lay there too.

She had spent eighteen years here on this land and never truly felt as if she belonged. She had thought she had found her place during her five years in the Academy in Oxenfurt, but that time had ended. She had spent the last two years since her graduation in Novigrad. She loved her work and always found lots of it in the bustling city, but at night in her small room above her office, she lay alone. She had not found her place in Novigrad as she had hoped she would.

Now she had buried the last people in the world who had loved her, and she felt a hollowness fill her heart.

Jenny looked around the farm one last time, mounted her horse, and rode away. She felt like she would never return to this place.

She traveled the roads back to Novigrad but dreaded the end of her journey. The urge to travel had come to her again, and no amount of injured or sick patients would draw it from her. She returned to Novigrad intending to close down her office, settle her accounts, and then let the open road dictate her path.

By the end of spring, Jenny was on the road with a small cart of medical supplies and food. At first, she traveled further north, stopping in small towns and villages along the way, trading medical services for more supplies and the occasional coin.

The beauty of the wilderness drew her ever onwards. Jenny carried a sword at her hip for bandits but had been lucky not to come across any in her journeys. Monsters and creatures still fell under her strange spell and passed her by without a thought of harming her.

In her time at Oxenfurt and then in Novigrad, she had not met anyone with such an ability. She often wondered about it in the lonely hours of the night. Was it inherited? That path of thought always led her to question about her long-dead birth mother. Was her hair silvery white too? Her father had never told her what her birth mother looked like, just explained she had died, and he buried her. Sometimes she would dream of a woman who looked like her only older, long silver hair, a small nose speckled with freckles, full lips, and wide blue eyes.

Jenny wondered about her true father too. Who was he? How had her mother come to be pregnant and alone in the wilds of Velen? What had brought her to such a place?

There were never any answers to the questions. All Jenny had was her name and strange hair. Everything else was a mystery.

Jenny traveled to Drakenborg and wintered there, she took up residence in a small house and healed the sick and injured from her parlor. She continued her studies, befriending local herbalists and healers and ever expanded her knowledge.

In the spring, she continued her journey to Flotsam and on to Vengerberg, where she spent the next winter again healing and learning. In the spring, she traveled on to Lyria and then to Rivia. She treated the sick and wounded. She drank and talked to many a strange person. She even spent a pleasant evening in Lyria in the company of a Witcher named Eskel. After stitching him up, they drank and shared stories. His cat eyes intrigued her, and her silver hair intrigued him.