‘Ciri! Stop!’

They suddenly found themselves amidst narrow streets full of the running and wailing mob. As she passed, Yennefer noticed bodies lying in the gutters, saw corpses hanging by their legs from posts and beams. She saw a dwarf lying on the ground being kicked and beaten with sticks, saw another being battered with the necks of broken bottles. She heard the shouts of the assailants, the screaming and howling of the beaten. She saw a throng clustering around a woman who had been thrown from a window and the glint of metal bars rising and falling.

The crowd closed in, the roar intensified. It seemed to the sorceresses that the distance between them and Ciri had shortened. The next obstacle in Kelpie’s way was a small group of disorientated halberdiers, whom the black mare treated like a fence and jumped over, knocking a flat kettle hat off one of them. The others simply squatted down in fear.

They burst into a square at full gallop. It was black with people. And smoke. Yennefer realised that Ciri, unerringly led by her prophetic vision, was heading for the very heart, the very centre of events. To the very core of the conflagrations, where murder was rampaging.

For a battle was raging in the street she had turned towards. Dwarves and elves were fiercely defending a makeshift barricade, defending a lost position, falling and dying under the pressure of the howling rabble attacking them. Ciri screamed and pressed herself to her horse’s neck. Kelpie took off and flew over the barricade, not like a horse, but like a huge black bird.

Yennefer rode into the crowd and reined her horse in sharply, knocking a few people over. She was dragged from the saddle before she managed to yell. She was hit on the shoulders, on the back, and on the back of her head. She fell onto her knees and saw an unshaven character in a shoemaker’s apron preparing to kick her.

Yennefer had had enough of people kicking her.

From her spread fingers shot pale blue, hissing fire, cutting like a horsewhip the faces, torsos and arms of the people surrounding her. There was a stench of burning flesh and for a moment howling and squealing rose above the general commotion and hullabaloo.

‘Witch! Elven witch! Enchantress!’

The next character leaped at her with a raised axe. Yennefer shot fire straight in his face. His eyeballs burst, seethed and spilled out onto his cheeks with a hiss.

The crowd thinned out. Someone grabbed her by the arm, and she recoiled, ready to fire, but it was Triss.

‘Let’s flee from here… Yenna… Flee… from here…’

I’ve heard her talking in a voice like that before, flashed a thought through Yennefer’s head. With lips like wood that not even a droplet of saliva can moisten. Lips that fear paralyses, that panic makes tremble.

I heard her talking in a voice like that. On Sodden Hill.

When she was dying of fear.