In spite of their fast pace, they had to stop for the night. Braenn chose an excellent spot; a hill onto which thermal updrafts carried gusts of warm air. They slept on dried bracken, very close to one another, in dryad custom. In the middle of the night Braenn hugged him close. And nothing more. He hugged her back. And nothing more. She was a dryad. The point was to keep warm.

They set off again at daybreak, while it was still almost dark.

II

They passed through a belt of sparsely forested hills, creeping cautiously across small valleys full of mist, moving through broad, grassy glades, and across clearings of wind-felled trees.

Braenn stopped once again and looked around. She had apparently lost her way, but Geralt knew that was impossible. Taking advantage of a break in the march, however, he sat down on a fallen tree.

And then he heard a scream. Shrill. High-pitched. Desperate.

Braenn knelt down in a flash, at once drawing two arrows from her quiver. She seized one in her teeth and nocked the other, bent her bow, taking aim blindly through the bushes towards the sound of the voice.

‘Don’t shoot!’ he cried.

He leaped over the tree trunk and forced his way through the brush.

A small creature in a short grey jacket was standing in a small clearing, at the foot of a rocky cliff, with its back pressed against the trunk of a withered hornbeam. Something was moving slowly about five paces in front of it, parting the grass. That thing was about twelve feet long and was dark brown. At first Geralt thought it was a snake. But then he noticed the wriggling, yellow, hooked limbs and flat segments of the long thorax and realised it was not a snake. It was something much more sinister.

The creature hugging the tree cried out shrilly. The immense myriapod raised above the grass long, twitching feelers with which it sensed odours and warmth.

‘Don’t move!’ The Witcher yelled and stamped to attract the scolopendromorph’s attention. But the myriapod did not react, for its feelers had already caught the scent of the nearer victim. The monster wriggled its limbs, coiled itself up like an ‘S’ and moved forward. Its bright yellow limbs rippled through grass, evenly, like the oars of a galley.

‘Yghern!’ Braenn yelled.

Geralt hurtled into the clearing in two bounds, jerking his sword from its scabbard on his back as he ran, and in full flight struck the petrified creature beneath the tree with his hip, shoving it aside into some brambles. The scolopendromorph rustled the grass, wriggled its legs and attacked, raising its anterior segments, its venom-dripping pincers chattering. Geralt danced, leaped over the flat body and slashed it with his sword from a half-turn, aiming at a vulnerable spot between the armoured plates on its body.

The monster was too swift, however, and the sword struck the chitinous shell, without cutting through it; the thick carpet of moss absorbed the blow. Geralt dodged, but not deftly enough. The scolopendromorph wound the posterior part of its body around his legs with enormous strength. The Witcher fell, rolled over and tried to pull himself free. In vain.