“I don’t think anything. You’re in command here.”

“I am, I am,” said the hejtman, spinning around on his heel. “In command of an army whose morale is failing fast. But you, Reynevan, shrug and think nothing. And what do you do? You save a stricken German. A papist. You bring him here, ordering our medic to treat him. You show a foe mercy. Before everybody’s eyes? You should have slit his throat in the bloody forest.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I swore…” Královec snarled through his teeth. “That after Oława… After Oława, I vowed I would show mercy to none of them. None.”

“We can’t stop being people.”

“People?” said the Hejtman of the Orphans, almost frothing at the mouth. “People? Do you know what happened in Oława? On Saint Anthony’s Eve? If you’d been there, you’d have seen it.”

“I was, and I did.” Observing unemotionally the hejtman’s astonished expression, Reynevan repeated: “I was in Oława. I ended up there a few days after Epiphany, soon after you left. I was in the town on the Sunday before Saint Anthony’s. And I saw it all. I also witnessed the triumph that Wrocław celebrated because of Oława.”

Královec said nothing for a moment, gazing from the earthwork at the bell tower of Strzegom parish church, where the bell had begun to toll, resonantly and sonorously.

“Why, you weren’t only in Oława, but also in Wrocław.” He stated the fact. “And now you’ve come here, to Strzegom. Like a bolt from the blue. You come and go. How and from where—no one knows. People have begun to talk, to gossip. To suspect.”

“Suspect what?”

“Easy, easy, don’t take umbrage. I trust you. I know you had important matters to deal with. When you bade us farewell on the battlefield at Wielisław on the twenty-seventh of December, we saw that you were hastening to attend to some important—extremely important—matters. How did you fare?”

“I solved nothing,” said Reynevan, without concealing his bitterness. “But I am cursed. Cursed standing, working and sitting. In the hills and the vales.”

“How so?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I adore long stories.”

The fact that something uncommon would happen that day in Wrocław Cathedral was communicated to the congregation gathered within by the excited murmurings of the people standing closer to the transept and the chancel. The latter could see and hear more than the rest, who were crammed tightly into the nave and the aisles. Initially, they had to settle for guesses. And rumours borne in a swelling, repeating whisper that spread through the crowd like the rustle of leaves in the wind.