‘Be quiet, both of you!’ Geralt shouted irately. ‘She’s saying something, it’s a difficult dialect, I need to concentrate!’

‘I’ve had enough!’ Sh’eenaz yelled melodiously. ‘I’m hungry! Well, White Hair, he must decide, decide at once. Tell him just one thing: I will not be made a laughing stock of any longer or associate with him if he’s going to look like a four-armed starfish. Tell him I have girlfriends who are much better at those frolics he was suggesting on the rocks! But I consider them immature games, fit for children before they shed their scales. I’m a normal, healthy mermaid—’

‘Sh’eenaz—’

‘Don’t interrupt! I haven’t finished yet! I’m healthy, normal and ripe for spawning, and if he really desires me, he must have a tail, fins and everything a normal merman has. Otherwise I don’t want to know him!’

Geralt translated quickly, trying not to be vulgar. He was not very successful. The duke flushed and swore foully.

‘The brazen hussy!’ he yelled. ‘The frigid mackerel! Let her find herself a cod!’

‘What did he say?’ Sh’eenaz asked curiously, swimming over.

‘That he doesn’t want a tail!’

‘Then tell him… Tell him to dry up!’

‘What did she say?’

‘She told you,’ the Witcher translated, ‘to go drown yourself.’

II

‘Ah well,’ Dandelion said. ‘Pity I couldn’t sail with you, but what could I do? Sailing makes me puke like nobody’s business. But you know what, I’ve never spoken to a mermaid. It’s a shame, dammit.’

‘I know you,’ Geralt said, fastening his saddle bags. ‘You’ll write a ballad anyway.’

‘Never fear. I already have the first stanzas. In my ballad the mermaid will sacrifice herself for the duke, she’ll exchange her fishtail for slender legs, but will pay for it by losing her voice. The duke will betray her, abandon her, and then she’ll perish from grief, and turn into foam, when the first rays of sunshine…’

‘Who’d believe such rot?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dandelion snorted. ‘Ballads aren’t written to be believed. They are written to move their audience. But why am I talking to you about this, when you know bugger all about it? You’d better tell me how much Agloval paid you.’

‘He didn’t pay me anything. He claimed I had failed to carry out the task. That he had expected something else, and he pays for results, not good intentions.’

Dandelion shook his head, took off his bonnet and looked at the Witcher with a forlorn grimace on his mouth.

‘You mean we still don’t have any money?’

‘So it would seem.’

Dandelion made an even more forlorn face.

‘It’s all my fault,’ he moaned. ‘I’m to blame for it all. Geralt, are you angry at me?’

No, the Witcher wasn’t angry at Dandelion. Not at all.

There was no doubt Dandelion was to blame for what had befallen them. He had insisted they went to the fair at Four Maples. Organising festivities, the poet argued, satisfied people’s profound and natural needs. From time to time, the bard maintained, a chap has to meet other people in a place where he can have a laugh and a singsong, gorge himself on kebabs and pierogis, drink beer, listen to music and squeeze a girl as he swung her around in the dance. If every chap wanted to satisfy those needs, Dandelion argued, individually, periodically and randomly, an indescribable mess would arise. For that reason holidays and festivities were invented. And since holidays and festivities exist, a chap ought to frequent them.