Sword of Destiny

It is a collection of six short stories, not a novel. The stories are "The Bounds of Reason", "A Shard of Ice", "Eternal Flame", "A Little Sacrifice", "Sword of Destiny" and "Something More". They share a cast and run in rough chronological order, so the book reads more continuously than a typical anthology, but each piece is a self-contained story.

It is the second of the two short story collections that precede the main Witcher saga, and it comes after The Last Wish and before Blood of Elves. The numbering looks inconsistent because two systems are in use: the English publishers (Gollancz and Orbit) label it "The Witcher 2", while the Polish saga ordering lists the two collections as 0.5 and 0.7 because they sit outside the five-novel sequence. Both put it in the same place on the shelf.

It is strongly recommended. The individual stories stand alone, but Sword of Destiny assumes you already know Geralt, Dandelion and the witcher's trade from The Last Wish, and it picks up the relationship with Yennefer partway through. More importantly, its closing stories pay off the Law of Surprise that The Last Wish sets up, which is the thread the whole later saga hangs on.

The original Polish edition, Miecz przeznaczenia, was published by superNOWA in 1992. The English translation is by David French and appeared 23 years later — Gollancz published it in the UK on 21 May 2015 and Orbit in the US on 1 December 2015. The gap is why the English editions arrived out of step with the novels: Blood of Elves had already been translated in 2008, several years before the collection that precedes it.