“Because there’s no point. I’m not surrounded by any vortex or fate. And if I were, why the hell would I delve into it?”

“Geralt, you’re sick.”

“Injured, you mean.”

“I know what I mean. There’s something not quite right with you. I can sense that. After all, I have known you ever since you were a youngster. When I met you, you came up to my waist. And now I feel that you’re spinning around in some damned whirlpool, tangled up in a slowly tightening noose. I want to know what’s happening. But I can’t do it myself. I have to count on Iola’s gifts.”

“You want to delve too deeply. Why the metaphysics? I’ll confide in you, if you like. I’ll fill your evenings with tales of ever more astounding events from the past few years. Get a keg of beer so my throat doesn’t dry up and we can start today. But I fear I’ll bore you because you won’t find any nooses or vortexes there. Just a witcher’s ordinary tales.”

“I’ll willingly listen to them. But a trance, I repeat, would do no harm.”

“Don’t you think”—he smiled—“that my lack of faith makes such a trance pointless?”

“No, I don’t. And do you know why?”

“No.”

Nenneke leaned over and looked him in the eyes with a strange smile on her pale lips.

“Because it would be the first proof I’ve ever heard of that a lack of faith has any kind of power at all.”

A GRAIN OF TRUTH

I

A number of black points moving against a bright sky streaked with mist drew the witcher’s attention. Birds. They wheeled in slow, peaceful circles, then suddenly swooped and soared up again, flapping their wings.

The witcher observed the birds for a long time, then—bearing in mind the shape of the land, density of the wood, depth and course of the ravine which he suspected lay in his path—calculated the distance to them, and how long he would take to cover it. Finally he threw aside his coat and tightened the belt across his chest by two holes. The pommel and hilt of the sword strapped across his back peeked over his shoulder.

“We’ll go a little out of our way, Roach,” he said. “We’ll take a detour from the highway. I don’t think the birds are circling there for nothing.”

The mare walked on, obedient to Geralt’s voice.

“Maybe it’s just a dead elk,” said Geralt. “But maybe it’s not. Who knows?”

There was a ravine, as he had suspected; the witcher scanned the crowns of the trees tightly filling the rift. But the sides of the gully were gentle, the riverbed dry and clear of blackthorns and rotting tree trunks. He crossed it easily. On the other side was a copse of birches, and behind it a large glade, heath and undergrowth, which threw tentacles of tangled branches and roots upward.

The birds, scared away by the appearance of a rider, soared higher, croaking sharply in their hoarse voices.