‘Don’t be horrified by the mess,’ she said, wiping her brow with her forearm, because she was wearing thin, dust-stained silk gloves. ‘The books are being inventoried and catalogued. But the work was stopped at my request so I could be alone in the library. I can’t bear strangers’ eyes on me while I’m working.’

‘I’m sorry. Shall I leave?’

‘You’re not a stranger.’ She narrowed her eyes slightly. ‘I enjoy… having your eyes on me. Don’t stand like that. Sit here, on the books.’

He sat down on A Description of the World published in folio.

‘This shambles—’ Fringilla indicated around her with a brisk gesture ‘—has unexpectedly made my work easier. I was able to get to books that are normally lying somewhere at the bottom of a heap that’s impossible to shift. The ducal librarians moved the mounds–a titanic effort!–thanks to which some literary treasures and rarities saw the light of day. Look. Ever seen anything like this?’

‘Speculum Aureum? Yes, I have.’

‘I apologise, I forgot. You’ve seen plenty. That was meant to be a compliment, not sarcasm. And take a glance at that. It’s Gesta Regum. We’ll start with that so you’ll understand who your Ciri really is, whose blood flows in her veins… Your expression’s sourer than usual, did you know? What’s the reason?’

‘Dandelion.’

‘Tell me.’

He did. Fringilla listened, sitting cross-legged on a pile of books.

‘Well,’ she sighed, after he’d finished. ‘I admit I expected something of the kind. I noticed long ago that Anarietta was betraying symptoms of lovesickness.’

‘Love?’ he snorted. ‘Or a lordly whim.’

‘You seem not to believe—’ she looked at him piercingly ‘—in sincere and pure love?’

‘My beliefs,’ he said, ‘aren’t the subject of debate and are beside the point. It’s about Dandelion and his stupid—’

He broke off, suddenly losing confidence.

‘Love,’ Fringilla said slowly, ‘is like renal colic. Until you have an attack, you can’t even imagine what it’s like. And when people tell you about it you don’t believe them.’

‘There’s something in that,’ the Witcher agreed. ‘But there are also differences. Good sense can’t protect you from renal colic. Or cure it.’

‘Love mocks good sense. That’s its charm and beauty.’

‘Stupidity, more like.’

She stood up and walked towards him, taking off her gloves. Her eyes were dark and profound beneath the curtains of her eyelashes. She smelled of ambergris, roses, library dust, decayed paper, minium and printing ink, oak gall ink, and strychnine, which was being used to poison the library mice. The smell had little in common with an aphrodisiac. So it was all the stranger that it worked on him.

‘Don’t you believe,’ she said in a changed voice, ‘in sudden impulses? In unforeseen attractions? In the impacts of fireballs flying along collision trajectories? In cataclysms?’