“I ought to admire your heartfelt outburst,” he drawled, “but reality makes me doubt it, and your naivety. For a halfway house does exist, Reinmar. Shades do exist, and as regards colours, there is a palette, a veritable rainbow. I’ve already told you: I don’t lend credence to the rumours, I don’t believe you were an agent provocateur and a traitor from the start, that you came to Bohemia and joined us only to betray us. But you began to spy. For us, admittedly, but what difference does that actually make? You became a spy. And that is a fucking spy’s lot, a spy’s fate and the fucking goods in a spy’s inventory: one day they finally catch you and turn you. It’s normal in this trade. They kidnapped the maid you were enamoured with. And blackmailed you. And you yielded to blackmail.”

“You jump quickly to conclusions. Will you manage to maintain this pace? Will I have to wait long for my sentence, too? And my punishment?”

“It’s you who draws too-hasty conclusions. Much too hasty. It’s time we stopped, dusk is falling. Hey, men! We’ll stop here, by the trees. Dismount!”

The fire—fanned by the wind—roared and cracked, the flames shooting upwards, sparks flying above the tops of the firs. The trees soughed.

The Moravians, having finished off a plump demijohn of slivovitz, lay down to sleep in turn, swathing themselves in cowled cloaks and sheepskins. The sick man, who had been laid down beside them, groaned, coughed and spat up phlegm. Urban Horn, yawning, used a stick to poke and move about the logs in the campfire. Reynevan was more hungry than sleepy. He was chewing some sheep’s cheese, lightly toasted over the glowing logs.

The sick man choked in another coughing fit.

“Couldn’t you take care of him?” Horn nodded towards him. “You’re a physician, after all. It would be right to help a suffering man.”

“I don’t have any medicine. Should I use magic? In the presence of Calixtines? To them sorcery is a peccatum—”

“—mortalium, I know. Then something natural? Some kind of herbs or plants?”

“In February? Very well, if there are any willows here, I’ll make a decoction from the bark in the morning. But his condition is improving—his fever has visibly diminished and the sweating is much reduced. Horn?”

“What?”

“I see you are taking good care of him.”

“Indeed?”

“And I surmise that the exchange of prisoners was all about him, rather than me.”

“Indeed?”

“Who is he?”

“Somebody.”

Reynevan lifted his head and looked for a long time at the Great Bear, visible behind clouds scudding across the sky.

“I understand,” he said finally. “I am under suspicion. Secrets aren’t shared with the likes of me. What difference does it make if the suspicions are inflated and unproven? You don’t share secrets and that’s that.”