‘I know.’

‘You’re going to Rivia, to that rendezvous you’re still keeping a secret—’

‘A surprise,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s a surprise, not a secret.’

‘Very well, a surprise. I, meanwhile, will sort out what I need to in Vengerberg, pick up Yennefer and we’ll both be in Rivia in six days. Don’t make faces, please. And let’s not part like it was forever. It’s just six days! Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Ciri.’

‘Rivia, in six days,’ she repeated once more, reining Kelpie around.

She galloped away at once. She was out of sight very quickly, and Geralt felt as though a cold, awful clawed hand was squeezing his stomach.

‘Six days,’ Dandelion repeated pensively. ‘From here to Vengerberg and back to Rivia… All together it’ll be close to two hundred and fifty miles… It’s impossible, Geralt. Indeed, on that devilish mare, on which the girl can travel at the speed of a courier, three times quicker than us, theoretically, very theoretically, she could cover such a distance in six days. But even the devilish mare has to rest. And that mysterious matter that Ciri has to take care of will also take some time. And thus it’s impossible…’

‘Nothing is impossible—’ the Witcher pursed his lips ‘—for Ciri.’

‘Can it be—?’

‘She’s not the girl you knew,’ Geralt interrupted him harshly. ‘Not any longer.’

Dandelion was silent for a long time.

‘I have a strange feeling…’

‘Be quiet. Don’t say anything. I beg you.’

May was over. The new moon was coming, the old moon was waning. It was very thin. They rode towards the mountains, barely visible on the horizon.

It was a typical landscape after a war. All of a sudden, graves and burial mounds had sprung up among the fields; skulls and skeletons lay white amidst the lush, spring grass. Corpses hung on roadside trees, and wolves sat beside the roads, waiting for the miserable travellers to weaken.

Grass no longer grew on the black patches of land where fires had passed through.

The villages and settlements, of which only charred chimneys remained, resounded with the banging of hammers and the rasping of saws. Near the ruins, peasant women dug holes in the scorched earth with hoes. Some of them, stumbling, were pulling harrows and ploughs and the webbing harnesses bit into their gaunt shoulders. Children hunted for grubs and worms in the newly ploughed furrows.

‘I have a vague feeling that something’s not as it should be here,’ said Dandelion, ‘Something’s missing… Do you have that impression, Geralt?’

‘Eh?’

‘Something’s not normal here.’

‘Nothing’s normal here, Dandelion. Nothing.’

During the warm, black and windless night, lit up by distant flashes of lightning and restless growls of thunder, Geralt and Dandelion saw from their camp the horizon in the west blooming with the red glow of fire. It wasn’t far and the wind that blew up brought the smell of smoke. The wind also brought snatches of sound. They heard–like it or not–the howling of people being murdered, the wailing of women, and the brash and triumphant yelling of bandits.