“Yes, yes, Reynevan. That’s just how it is. Every action causes a reaction, every event has its effect, and every effect triggers further effects. In Domrémy, Champagne, for example, a wench named Jehanne has been hearing voices. What effects will flow from that? What effects will be caused in the long term by the ball from a French bombard that mutilated the face of the Earl of Salisbury last autumn at the Siege of Orléans? Or that after Salisbury’s agonising death, the Earl of Suffolk assumed command of the army besieging Orléans? What influence on the fate of the world will Stanisław Ciołek’s poems have, which he will write as the new Bishop of Poznań? Or the fact that Sigismund Korybut, released from imprisonment in Valdštejn Castle by the intercession of the Polish King, Władysław Jagiełło, will not return to Lithuania, but will remain in Bohemia? Or that Jagiełło and the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg will soon meet in Lutsk in Volyn in order to weigh up the fates of eastern Europe? What significance for history will have the fact that neither Jagiełło nor Witold can be poisoned, since their regular drinking of magical water from mysterious Samogitian springs protects them from being poisoned? Or, to use the trite example, that you, Reynevan of Bielawa, will persuade Jan Královec’s Orphans to return to Bohemia?

“Everybody would like to know which events will exert an influence on history, on the fate of the world. Everybody would like to, but no one knows. I would, too, and I don’t know, either. But believe me: I’m doing my bloody best to find out. Reynevan? Hey! Can you hear me?”

Reynevan couldn’t. He was drowning.

In nightmares.

In recent times, nightmares hadn’t been a problem for Elencza of Stietencron—and even if they had, it was a petty and trifling one. After spending the entire day treating the sick in the Oława hospice of Saint Świerad, Elencza was generally too weary to dream. Awoken and hauled from her bed ante lucem, before Matins, she and Dorota Faber and the other volunteers hurried to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, which soon had to be distributed among the patients. Then there were prayers in the hospital chapel, attending to the patients, then again the kitchen, then the laundry, the hospital ward again, prayers, the ward, washing the floors, the kitchen, the ward, the kitchen, the laundry, prayers. As a result, right after the evening Ave, Elencza would fall onto her pallet and sleep like a log, her hands clenching her feather-bed in an anxious presentiment of her early reveille. It was no wonder that such a lifestyle effectively deprived her of dreaming. Nightmares—once a problem for Elencza—stopped being one.