‘That’s easy to say! They’ve ensnared me with some kind of magical barrier or tether…’

You are the Master of Places and Times. You cannot be tethered.

Vysogota straightens up. Behind his back is a plateau, a rocky plain, and on it shipwrecks. Dozens of shipwrecks. And beyond them a castle; black, ominous, toothed with battlements, rising up above a mountain lake.

They will perish without your help, O Swallow. Only you can save them.

Yennefer’s mouth, cut and bloodied, moves noiselessly, gushing blood. Her violet eyes shine, burn in her face; gaunt, contorted, blackened by torture, covered by a shock of unkempt, dirty black hair. A foul-smelling puddle in a hollow of the floor, rats scurrying all around. The horrifying cold of the stone walls. The cold of shackles on her wrists, on her ankles…

Yennefer’s hands and fingers are a mass of dried blood.

‘Mummy! What have they done to you?’

A marble staircase leading downwards. A staircase with three landings.

Va’esse deireadh aep eigean… Something ends… What?

A staircase. Fire blazing in iron cressets at the bottom. Burning tapestries.

Let’s go, says Geralt. Steps leading downwards. We have to. We must. There’s no other way. Just this staircase. I want to see the sky.

His lips aren’t moving. They’re blue and there’s blood on them. Blood, blood everywhere… The stairs are totally covered in blood.

There’s no other way. No other way, Star-Eye.

‘How?’ she cries. ‘How can I help them? I’m in another world! Imprisoned! And powerless!’

You cannot be imprisoned.

Everything has been written, says Vysogota. Even this. Look beneath your feet.

Ciri sees in horror that she’s standing in a sea of bones. Among skulls, shinbones and ribs.

Only you can prevent it, Star-Eye.

Vysogota straightens up. Behind him is winter, snow, a blizzard. The wind blows and whistles. Before her, in the snowstorm, on a horse, is Geralt. Ciri recognises him, although he has a fur hat on his head, and his face is shrouded in a woollen scarf. Behind him in the blizzard loom other riders, their silhouettes vague, so muffled up are they that there is no way to identify them.

Geralt looks straight at her. But doesn’t see her. Snow falls into his eyes.

‘Geralt! It’s me! Here!’

He can’t see her. Or hear her among the wailing of the gale.

‘Geraaalt!’

It’s a moufflon, says Geralt. Only a moufflon. Let’s go back. The riders disappear, dissolving in the snowstorm.

‘Geraaalt! Nooooo!’

She woke up.

Next morning she went at once to the stables without even eating breakfast. She didn’t want to meet Avallac’h, didn’t want to talk to him. She preferred to avoid the intrusive, curious, questioning, clinging looks of the other elves and elf-women. On every other occasion studiously indifferent, now the elves were betraying their curiosity on the subject of the royal bedchamber, and the palace walls, Ciri was certain, had ears.