SPOILERS
I think Sapkowski wanted us to forgive Geralt because he was subjected to such a blatant double standard by Essi.
Geralt assaults Essi on the jetty and she seems not into it at first – pulling her upper body away "powerfully" – but then kind of acquiesces. Often women (and men, too) will kind of go along with sexual assault to avoid getting murdered or beat to a pulp. But, it started out as assault.
Dandelion knows Essi pretty well and her "glowing cheeks" when she got back from the jetty are a little damning.
Essi discriminated against Geralt, on a social level; Dandelion and Essi talk mad shit to each other for two paragraphs, and neither runs off in a huff, but then when a Witcher implies Essi shouldn't gossip about Agloval's girl problems so loudly, she runs off.
As we find out later, Essi was in love at first sight, so being humiliated by your crush can be hard to deal with, but at the time, all Geralt knows is he's being subjected to a drastically double standard here.
So he assaults her even after she apologized to him, and Dandelion was partly right about Geralt's motivations. It's one of the oldest motives, so many men decide to get even by asserting their sexuality or their body over someone else. Straight men even do it to other men.
I have to say A Little Sacrifice is my favorite short story now. The love story between Geralt and Essi has so many twists and turns for something so short, it's incredibly moving and the ending sears your soul in a way I didn't think was possible. Sapkowski fleshes out Dandelion in this story so much with so few events and character moments; pound for pound, word for word, Sword of Destiny might be the greatest fantasy book ever written. Essi's story and Dandelion burying her is branded onto my heart in a way that my childhood memories are.
Finally, I maintain that the double negative is intentional in "To no one.", meaning Dandelion sang *the ballad he wrote about Essi and Geralt to everyone he could, but I wish Sapkowski had him tell the true story about Essi's death and her incredible courage and fearlessness in life; she admitted illness scared her the most, being helpless and bedridden, but she had the courage to confess her love to Geralt and be humiliated from the helplessness of it and even more from Geralt being embarrassed by it, didn't opt to keep her hatred for Yennefer to herself that could have helped her surreptitiously hunt Yennefer down using her bardic social skills to maneuver into position and murder her, and then she'd probably have Geralt all to herself (I mean, she gets along with Dandelion, who else will travel around like a bum with Geralt), and the courage to call Agloval on his bullshit and somehow still find a glimmer of good in him, and somehow stayed in Vizima during a smallpox epidemic that was "raging" when she was Essi Daven and could have left; Essi might have the biggest balls on any character in the Witcher books.
by aaronespro