“Don’t pour your sorrows out to Elencza about your love for another.” Dzierżka of Wirsing’s voice took on a hard tone. “Don’t confide in her about your love for another. Don’t tell her what a great love it is. And don’t make her pity you because of it. Don’t make her suffer.”

“I don’t underst—”

“Oh, you do, you do.”

“You’re right, Father,” Reynevan admitted bitterly. “Indeed, whenever there’s a problem, it’s of the female sex. And my problems are multiplying, springing up like mushrooms… But the greatest of them at this moment is Jutta. And I’m in a quandary. I have absolutely no idea what to do—”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Canon Otto Beess declared gravely. “Because I don’t know, either. I didn’t interrupt your tale, though in places it resembled a troubadour’s song, so many fanciful improbabilities did it contain. In particular, I cannot conceive of Inquisitor Grzegorz Hejncze abducting maids. Hejncze has his own intelligence and counter-intelligence service, a network of agents, and it is also common knowledge that for a long time he has been trying to infiltrate the Hussites and that he is unscrupulous. But kidnapping maids? Your story fails to convince me in any way. But then again, anything’s possible.”

“That is actually true,” muttered Reynevan.

The canon bored his gaze into Reynevan’s but said nothing. He drummed his fingers on the table.

“Today is Candlemas,” he finally said. “The second day of February. Five weeks have passed since the Battle of Wielisław. I presume you’ve been in Silesia all this time. Where, exactly? Did you perhaps visit the convent in White Church?”

“I did not. At first, I meant to… The abbess is a sorceress, and magic might have helped in my hunt for Jutta. But I didn’t go there. That other time… That other time I brought danger down on them, on Jutta and the nuns, on the entire convent. I almost caused their downfall. Furthermore—”