Nimue cleared her throat impatiently. Condwiramurs turned away from the window, and then bent over the etchings. One of the boards in particular caught her eye. A girl with windswept hair, riding a black mare rearing up. Beside her a white unicorn, also rampant, its mane blown around like the girl’s.

‘I think that’s the only fragment of the legend that historians have never quibbled about,’ commented the novice, ‘unanimously regarding it as a fabrication and a fairy-tale embellishment, or a delirious metaphor. And painters and illustrators, spiting the scholars, took a liking to the episode. Look, prithee: each picture is Ciri and the unicorn. What do we have here? Ciri and the unicorn on a cliff above a sea beach. And here, if you please: Ciri and the unicorn in a landscape like something from a drug-induced trance, at night, beneath two moons.’

Nimue said nothing.

‘In a word—’ Condwiramurs tossed the boards onto the table ‘—everywhere it’s Ciri and the unicorn. Ciri and the unicorn in the labyrinth of the worlds, Ciri and the unicorn in the abyss of times—’

‘Ciri and the unicorn,’ interrupted Nimue, looking at the window, at the lake, at the boat and the Fisher King thrashing around in it. ‘Ciri and the unicorn emerge from nothingness like apparitions, suspended over some lake or other… And perhaps it’s constantly the same lake, one that spans times and places like a bridge, at once different, but nonetheless the same?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Apparitions.’ Nimue wasn’t looking at her. ‘Visitors from other dimensions, other planes, other places, other times. Apparitions that change someone’s life. That also change their own life, their own fate… Unbeknownst to them. For them it’s simply… another place. Not that place, not that time… Once again, one more time in a row, not that time—’

‘Nimue,’ Condwiramurs interrupted with a forced smile. ‘It’s me who’s the dream-reader, let me remind you. I’m the expert on dream visions and oneiroscopy. And all of a sudden you begin to prophesy. As though you saw what you’re talking about… in a dream.’

The Fisher King, judging by the sudden intensity of his voice and his cursing, had failed to unhitch the lure and the line had snapped. Nimue said nothing, and looked at the engravings. At Ciri and the unicorn.

‘I really have seen in a dream what I’ve been talking about,’ she finally said, very calmly. ‘I saw it many times in my dreams. And once while awake.’