“It’s the end, isn’t it? Gone with the wind? Of course, she and the sorcerers needed you, you’ve done the job, now you can go. And know what? I’m glad it’s happening now. You had to finish that bizarre affair some time, and the longer it went on the more dangerous the consequences were potentially becoming. If you want to know my opinion, you should also be glad it’s over and that it went so smoothly. You should then dress your countenance in a joyful smile, not a saturnine and gloomy grimace which, believe me, doesn’t suit you at all. With it, you look quite simply like a man with a serious hangover, who to cap it all has got food poisoning and doesn’t remember when he broke a tooth and on what, or how he got the semen stains on his britches.

“Or perhaps your melancholy results from something else?” continued the bard, completely undaunted by the Witcher’s lack of reaction. “If only from the fact that you were thrown out on your ear when you were planning a finale in your own, inimitable style? The one with the flight at dawn and flowers on the bedside table? Ha, ha, being in love is like being at war, my friend, and your beloved behaved like an expert strategist. She acted pre-emptively, with a preventative strike. She must have read Marshal Pelligram’s The History of Warfare. Pelligram cites many examples of victories won using a similar stratagem.”

Geralt still didn’t react. It was apparent that Dandelion didn’t expect a reaction. He finished his beer and gestured to the innkeeper’s wife to bring another.

“Taking the above into consideration,” he continued, twisting the pegs of his lute, “I’m generally in favour of sex on the first date. In the future, I recommend it to you in every respect. It eliminates the necessity of any further rendezvous with the same person, which can be wearisome and time-consuming. While we’re on the subject, that lady lawyer you recommended turned out indeed to be worth the bother. You wouldn’t believe—”

“I would,” the Witcher spat, interrupting him quite bluntly. “I can believe it without hearing an account, so you can give it a miss.”

“Indeed,” the bard noted. “Dejected, distressed and consumed by care, owing to which you’re tetchy and brusque. It’s not just the woman, it seems to me. There’s something else. I know it, dammit. And see it. Did you fail in Novigrad? Didn’t you get your swords back?”

Geralt sighed, although he had promised himself he wouldn’t.