Margarita Laux-Antille

The rector of Aretuza and a founding member of the Lodge of Sorceresses, rescued by Geralt and Yennefer from a witch hunter prison.

Margarita Laux-Antille, Rita to her friends, is a sorceress and the rector of Aretuza, the academy for young sorceresses on Thanedd Island where her famous grandmother Ilona once studied. Tall, fair-haired and said to have a figure no sculptor could rival, she also stands apart from her colleagues in another way: she has no interest in politics. Her loyalty is to her school and her students, and it was care for them that brought her into the Lodge of Sorceresses, of which she is a founding member.

Margarita in The Witcher 3
After the massacre at Loc Muinne, Margarita goes into hiding with the other northern sorceresses of the Lodge, but she stays in touch with Philippa Eilhart, and the two discuss reviving the Lodge. Fearing that witch hunters would soon come for Aretuza, she takes her students to Novigrad, hoping to join the escape to Kovir that Triss is organising. Instead they are captured. Her pupils are burned one by one, with Radovid saving Rita for last, and because she admits nothing under interrogation, her torture only gets worse.

In The Great Escape, Yennefer sets out to free her old friend from Deireadh, the best-guarded prison in the North. A former inmate reveals a way in through the sewers beneath Oxenfurt, and Zoltan may help by getting the guards drunk. Geralt fights his way to the cell block, takes the key from the warden and opens Margarita’s cell, and Yennefer teleports in to carry her out. Rita is in a sorry state, but freedom lifts her spirits, and Yennefer nurses her at Dandelion’s inn. In Final Preparations she and Philippa offer Ciri an equal place in a reborn Lodge, which Ciri turns down, and she is aboard the ship when the company reaches Skellige in Battle Preparations.

In the earlier games
In The Witcher 2 she is only mentioned. The Nilfgaardian ambassador names her among the Lodge sorceresses accused of plotting the murders of King Demavend and Foltest, all of them sentenced to death.

In the books
In Time of Contempt, Margarita and Tissaia de Vries search Gors Velen for runaway students and mistake Ciri for one of them. After the coup on Thanedd she takes refuge at Philippa’s castle, Montecalvo, with Keira Metz and Triss. In Baptism of Fire she helps found the Lodge, and her comparison of students from Aretuza and Ban Ard backs the decision that only women may join.