Dandelion said nothing, glancing fearfully at the Witcher every now and then.

But the Witcher didn’t even twitch, didn’t even turn his head around. And his face seemed to be cast in bronze.

They continued on their journey the next morning. They didn’t even look at the thin trail of smoke rising above some trees.

And later they chanced upon a column of settlers.

They were walking in a long line. Slowly. Carrying small bundles. They walked in complete silence. Men, boys, women and children. They walked without grumbling, without tears, without a word of complaint. Without screams, without any desperate wailing.

But there were screams and despair in their eyes. In the empty eyes of people who had been damaged. Robbed, beaten, driven away.

‘Who are they?’ Dandelion ignored the hostility visible in the eyes of the officer supervising the march. ‘Who are you driving like this?’

‘They’re Nilfgaardians,’ snapped a sub-lieutenant from the height of his saddle. He was a ruddy-faced stripling, of no more than eighteen summers. ‘Nilfgaardian settlers. They appeared in our lands like cockroaches! And we’ll sweep them away like cockroaches. So was it decided in Cintra and so was it written in the peace treaty.’

He leaned over and spat.

‘And if it was up to me,’ he continued, looking defiantly at Dandelion and the Witcher, ‘I wouldn’t let them get out of here alive, the rats.’

‘And if it depended on me,’ said a non-commissioned officer with a grey moustache in a slow, drawling voice, looking at his commander with a gaze strangely devoid of respect, ‘I’d leave them in peace on their farms. I wouldn’t drive good farmers from the land. I’d be glad that agriculture was prospering. That there’s something to eat.’

‘You’re as thick as pig shit, Sergeant,’ snapped the sub-lieutenant. ‘It’s Nilfgaard! It’s not our language, not our culture, not our blood. We’d be glad of the agriculture and nursing a viper in our bosom. Traitors, ready to stab us in the back. Perhaps you think there’ll be harmony with the Black Cloaks forever. No, they can go back where they came from… Hey, soldiers! That one has a cart! Get it off him, at the double!’

The order was carried out extremely zealously. With the use not only of heels and fists, but truncheons too.

Dandelion gave a slight cough.

‘What, something not to your liking, perhaps?’ The youthful sub-lieutenant glared at him. ‘Perhaps you’re a Nilfgaard-lover?’

‘Heaven forbid,’ Dandelion swallowed.

Many of the empty-eyed women and girls walking like automatons had torn garments, swollen and bruised faces, and thighs and calves marked by trickles of dried blood. Many of them had to be supported as they walked. Dandelion looked at Geralt’s face and began to be afraid.

‘Time we were going,’ he mumbled. ‘Farewell, gentlemen.’

The sub-lieutenant didn’t even turn his head around, preoccupied with checking that none of the settlers were carrying luggage larger than the Peace of Cintra had determined.

The column of settlers walked on.