Geralt held Degerlund up a moment longer. Then he jerked the sorcerer’s head hard sideways, to be quite certain. Then he let him go. The sorcerer slid down onto the floor, softly, like a silk cloth.

The Witcher wiped the saliva from his sleeve on a curtain. The large black cat appeared from nowhere. It rubbed itself against Degerlund’s body. Licked his motionless hand. Meowed and cried mournfully. It lay down beside the corpse, cuddling up against its side. And looked at the Witcher with its wide-open golden eyes.

“I had to,” said the Witcher. “It was necessary. If anyone, you ought to understand.”

The cat narrowed its eyes. To indicate it did.

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d;

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d.

William Shakespeare,

Richard II

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The weather on the day of the royal wedding had been wonderful from early morning, the blue sky over Kerack not sullied by even a single cloud. It had been very warm since the morning, but the hot weather was tempered by a sea breeze.

There had been a commotion in the upper town from the early morning. The streets and squares had been thoroughly swept, the house fronts decorated with ribbons and garlands, and pennants put on flagpoles. Since the morning, a line of suppliers had streamed along the road leading to the royal palace. Laden wagons and carts passed empty ones on their way back, and porters, craftsmen, merchants, messengers and couriers ran up the hill. Some time after, the road had teemed with sedan chairs carrying wedding guests to the palace. My nuptials are no laughing matter, King Belohun was heard to have said, my nuptials will become lodged in people’s memory and talked about through the whole wide world. On the order of the king, the celebrations were thus meant to begin in the morning and last long into the night. The guests would be facing quite unprecedented attractions throughout the whole day. Kerack was a tiny kingdom and actually fairly insignificant, hence Geralt doubted whether the world was particularly bothered about Belohun’s nuptials, even though he had decided to hold balls the entire week and God knows what attractions he had come up with, and there was no chance the people living more than a hundred miles away could have heard of the event. But to Belohun—as was universally known—the city of Kerack was the centre of the world and the world was the small region surrounding Kerack.