And then the nights and dreams. Various dreams. Celibacy made itself felt. At times, instead of the mysteries of the Witcher legend, Condwiramurs dreamed of the Fisher King in all sorts of situations, from extremely non-erotic to extremely erotic. In an extremely non-erotic dream The Fisher King was dragging her behind his boat on a rope. He was rowing slowly and languidly, so she was sinking, drowning, spluttering, and on top of that a terrible fear was tormenting her–she felt that something had pushed off the lake bottom and was swimming up towards her, something awful, something that wanted to swallow the bait–her–being pulled behind the boat. That something was on the point of seizing her when the Fisher King leaned more heavily on the oars, pulling her out of range of the invisible predator’s jaws. As she was dragged along she choked on water and at that moment she awoke.

In an unambiguously erotic dream she was kneeling on the bottom of the rocking boat, hanging over the side, and The Fisher King was holding her by the shoulders and fucking her exuberantly, grunting, hawking and spitting as he did so. Apart from the physical pleasure, Condwiramurs felt gut-wrenching terror–what would happen if Nimue caught them at it? She suddenly saw the face of the little sorceress rocking in the lake… and she awoke, soaked in sweat.

Then she got up and opened the window, luxuriated in the night air, the light of the moon and the mist rolling off the lake.

And dreamed on.

The tower of Inis Vitre had a terrace supported on columns, suspended over the lake. At the beginning, Condwiramurs did not pay any attention to the matter, but finally began to wonder. The terrace was strange, because it was totally inaccessible. It was impossible to get onto the terrace from any of the rooms she knew.

Aware that the abodes of sorceresses were sure to have such secret anomalies, Condwiramurs did not ask any questions. Even when–as she took a walk along the lake shore–she saw Nimue watching her from the terrace. It was inaccessible, it turned out, only to the unauthorised and the profane.

Piqued that she was thought of as profane, she dug her heels in and pretended that nothing was the matter. But it wasn’t long before the secret of the terrace was revealed.

It was after she had been visited by a series of dreams, triggered by the watercolours of Wilma Wessely. Clearly fascinated by that fragment of the legend, the artist devoted all her works to Ciri in the Tower of the Swallow.

‘I’m having strange dreams after those paintings,’ the novice complained the next morning. ‘I’m dreaming of… paintings. Always the same paintings. Not situations, not scenes, but paintings. Ciri on the tower’s battlements… An unmoving picture.’

‘And nothing else? No sensations apart from visual ones?’