Book Review - Crossroads of Ravens

The story

This is Geralt before he is even of Rivia: barely out of the witcher keep of Kaer Morhen, young, sharp, and far from sure of himself, setting out on the Path for the very first time. Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel follows those early contracts and harder lessons, as a newly made monster-hunter starts to learn how little the world he bleeds for thinks of his kind. It is the earliest chapter of Geralt’s life yet written in the Witcher saga.

Back to the Path

After spending so much time in the world of the Witcher, through the books and the late nights playing the games, I did not think Sapkowski could still surprise me with Geralt. Crossroads of Ravens proved me wrong. Instead of the weary, sharp-tongued witcher I already knew, this book hands you a much younger Geralt, barely out of Kaer Morhen, still figuring out what kind of man, or monster, the world expects him to be.

The first steps of a witcher

What I enjoyed the most was watching Geralt at the very start of his Path. He is fast and deadly, trained for a single purpose, and yet he is also naive, unsure, and far more human than the legend he would later become. Sapkowski takes his time here, showing the small contracts, the mistakes, the doubts, and the slow realisation of how the world actually treats someone like him.

Seeing the origin of so many things I had taken for granted in the later stories gave the whole saga a new weight. You understand that the cold, distant Geralt was not born that way. He is shaped, slowly and painfully, by everything that happens to him on this road.

Evil, and the refusal to choose

This is also the book where the seed of Geralt’s philosophy gets planted. Faced again and again with situations where there is no clean answer, where every path leads to someone getting hurt, he begins to wrestle with the idea of the lesser evil. People want him to pick a side, to decide which evil is more acceptable, and he simply refuses. He does not have the words yet. Years later he will find them, in front of a wizard who wants him to kill a girl:

Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. […] But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.

Here he only has the refusal, and no way to explain it. It is easy to read that as stubbornness, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt like the only honest position. Calling something the lesser evil is still calling it evil, and pretending otherwise is how people make peace with terrible things. Watching a young Geralt arrive at this on his own was the emotional core of the book for me.

The mentor Geralt did not ask for

There is a second man at the centre of this book, and his name is Preston Holt. Geralt meets him at the worst moment of his young life: he has killed a deserter to protect a peasant and the man’s daughter, and the reward for that is a sentence to hang. Holt is the older witcher who rides in and stops it, and then, without anyone asking him to, appoints himself Geralt’s mentor.

I did not trust him, and I do not think you are meant to. Holt keeps his own counsel, he steers conversations, and he uses Geralt more than once without saying so. He survived the attack on Kaer Morhen and has spent the years since hunting the men behind it, and he named his estate Rocamora, which is revenge in the Elder Speech. A man who does that is not taking in a stray out of kindness. Geralt watches him carefully for the whole novel, and he is right to.

And yet Holt is the first real teacher Geralt has outside the keep. Vesemir gave him the swords, the signs, the mutations, everything a witcher needs to survive a monster. What Vesemir could not give him, because Vesemir stayed behind those walls, is the world: how people lie, how a court works, who will pay you and who will hang you instead, how to kill a man with your bare hands when you have no steel. Holt teaches him all of that, and he teaches him what it costs to live in it, and at the end he pays that cost himself rather than let Geralt pay it.

Who the real monsters are

The other thread that hit hard was the discrimination the witchers live with. They are mutants, created to protect people from the creatures that hunt those people in the dark, and their reward is to be feared, insulted, and treated as freaks. They are called monsters to their faces by the very people they bleed for.

And yet, again and again, the book shows you who the real monsters are. The humans, with their fear, their greed, and their cruelty, often do far worse than anything Geralt is paid to hunt. The creatures act on instinct; people choose. That contrast, monsters by birth against monsters by choice, is where Sapkowski has always been at his best.

Final thoughts

Crossroads of Ravens is not a grand, world-shaking adventure, and I think that is the point. It is a quiet, sharp look at how a legend begins, and at the small moral choices that slowly turn a young man into the witcher we know. If you already love this world, it adds a layer you did not know you were missing. And if you do not, come to it for the monsters, the human kind especially.