Some soldiers pulled Dandelion from the wagon, treating him, however, with astonishing courtesy, without brutality, with positive reverence, the most they were capable of. They untied his hands before the steps leading to the scaffold. Then he nonchalantly scratched his behind and climbed the steps without being urged.

One of the steps suddenly creaked and the railing, made of a rough pole, cracked. Dandelion almost lost his balance.

‘That needs fixing, dammit!’ he yelled. ‘You’ll see, one day somebody will kill themselves on these steps. And that wouldn’t be funny.’

Dandelion was intercepted on the scaffolding by two hangman’s assistants in sleeveless leather jerkins. The executioner, as broad in the shoulders as a castle keep, looked at the condemned man through slits in his hood. Beside him stood a character in a sumptuous, though funereally black outfit. He also wore a funereal expression.

‘Good gentlemen and burghers of Beauclair and the surroundings!’ he read thunderously and funereally from an unrolled parchment. ‘It is known that Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, alias Dandelion—’

‘Pancratts what?’ Ciri whispered a question.

‘—by sentence of the Ducal High Court has been found guilty of all the crimes, misdeeds and offences of which he is accused, namely: lèse-majesté, treason, and furthermore sullying the dignity of the noble estate through perjury, lampooning, calumny and slander, also roistering and indecency as well as debauchery, in other words harlotry. Thus the tribunal has adjudged to punish Viscount Julian et cetera, primo: by defacing his coat of arms, by painting diagonal black lines on his escutcheon. Secundo: by the confiscation of his property, lands, estates, copses, forests and castles…’

‘Castles,’ groaned the Witcher. ‘What castles?’

Dandelion snorted insolently. The expression on his face demonstrated emphatically that he was heartily amused by the confiscation announced by the tribunal.

‘Tertio: the chief penalty. Anna Henrietta, reigning over us as Her Enlightenment the Duchess of Toussaint and Lady of Beauclair, has deigned to commute the punishment provided for the above-mentioned crimes of being dragged behind horses, broken on the wheel and quartered, to beheading by axe. May justice be done!’

The crowd raised several incoherent shouts. The women standing in the front row began to hypocritically wail and falsely lament. Children were lifted up or carried on shoulders so as not to miss any of the spectacle. The executioner’s assistants rolled a stump into the centre of the scaffold and covered it with a napkin. There was something of a commotion, since it turned out someone had swiped the wicker basket for the severed head, but another one was quickly found.

Four ragged street urchins had spread out a kerchief beneath the scaffold to catch blood on it. There was great demand for that kind of souvenir, you could earn good money from them.

‘Geralt.’ Ciri didn’t raise her lowered head. ‘We have to do something…’

He didn’t answer.

‘I wish to address the townspeople,’ Dandelion proudly declared.

‘Make it short, Viscount.’