‘I was about six or seven then. My oldest sister was fourteen and was already twisted from stooping over her labours. A peasant woman’s lot! In our village, girls were prepared for that from childhood! To stoop! Endlessly to stoop, to stoop and bend over our work, over a child, under the weight of a swollen belly, forced on you by your man the moment you’d risen from childbed.

‘Those beggar’s tales made me begin to wish for something more than a stoop and the daily grind, to dream for something more than the harvest, a husband and children. The first book I bought from the takings of selling brambles gathered in the forest was the legend of Ciri. The cleaned-up version, as you nicely described it, for children, the précis ad ursum delphini. That version was just right for me. I was a poor reader. But already by then I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be like Philippa Eilhart, like Sheala de Tancarville, like Assire var Anahid…’

They both looked at a gouache depicting a castle chamber, a table and some women sitting around it, in subtle chiaroscuro. Legendary women.

‘In the academy where I was admitted–at the second attempt, actually,’ Nimue continued, ‘I only studied the myth with respect to the Great Lodge during lessons on the history of magic. At first I simply didn’t have time to read for pleasure. I had to focus, in order to… keep up with the darling daughters of counts and bankers to whom everything came easily, who laughed at lasses from the country…’

She fell silent and cracked her knuckles.

‘I finally found time for reading,’ she continued, ‘but then I realised that the vicissitudes of Geralt and Ciri entertained me much less than they had during my childhood. A similar syndrome to yours occurred. What did you call it? Marital duties? It was like that until…’

She fell silent and rubbed her face. Condwiramurs noticed in amazement that the hand of the Lady of the Lake was trembling.

‘I suppose I was eighteen, when… when something happened. Something that made the legend of Ciri live in me again. That made me begin to involve myself with it seriously, as a scholar. Made me begin to devote my life to it.’

The novice remained silent, although curiosity was raging inside her.

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know,’ Nimue said tartly. ‘Everyone knows that the Lady of the Lake is possessed by a literally pathological obsession about the legend of Ciri. Everybody gossips about how an initially harmless fad transformed into something like an addiction to narcotics, or simply a mania. There is a good deal of truth to those rumours, my dear Condwiramurs, a good deal! And you, since I chose you as my assistant, will also descend into mania and dependency. For I shall demand it. At least for the time of your apprenticeship. Do you understand?’

The novice nodded.