“With the usual question, I take it,” interrupted Geralt. “ ‘Who is the fairest of them all?’ I know; all Nehalenia’s Mirrors are either polite or broken.”

“You’re wrong. Aridea was more interested in her country’s fate. And the Mirror answered her questions by predicting a horrible death for her and for a great number of others by the hand, or fault, of Fredefalk’s daughter from his first marriage. Aridea ensured this news reached the Council, and the Council sent me to Creyden. I don’t have to add that Fredefalk’s firstborn daughter was born shortly after the eclipse. I was quite discreet for a little while. She managed to torture a canary and two puppies during that time, and also gouged out a servant’s eye with the handle of a comb. I carried out a few tests using curses, and most of them confirmed that the little one was a mutant. I went to Aridea with the news because Fredefalk’s daughter meant the world to him. Aridea, as I said, wasn’t stupid—”

“Of course,” Geralt interrupted again, “and no doubt she wasn’t head-over-heels in love with her stepdaughter. She preferred her own children to inherit the throne. I can guess what followed. How come nobody throttled her? And you, too, while they were at it.”

Stregobor sighed, raised his eyes to heaven, where the rainbow was still shimmering colorfully and picturesquely.

“I wanted to isolate her, but Aridea decided otherwise. She sent the little one out into the forest with a hired thug, a trapper. We found him later in the undergrowth…without any trousers, so it wasn’t hard to recreate the turn of events. She had dug a brooch-pin into his brain, through his ear, no doubt while his attention was on entirely different matters.”

“If you think I feel sorry for him,” muttered Geralt, “then you’re wrong.”

“We organized a manhunt,” continued Stregobor, “but all traces of the little one had disappeared. I had to leave Creyden in a hurry because Fredefalk was beginning to suspect something. Then, four years later I received news from Aridea. She’d tracked down the little one, who was living in Mahakam with seven gnomes whom she’d managed to convince it was more profitable to rob merchants on the roads than to pollute their lungs with dust from the mines. She was known as Shrike because she liked to impale the people she caught on a sharp pole while they were still alive. Several times Aridea hired assassins, but none of them returned. Well, then it became hard to find anyone to try—Shrike had already become quite famous. She’d learned to use a sword so well there was hardly a man who could defy her. I was summoned, and arrived in Creyden secretly, only to learn that someone had poisoned Aridea. It was generally believed that it was the work of Fredefalk, who had found himself a younger, more robust mistress—but I think it was Renfri.”

“Renfri?”

“That’s what she was called. I said she’d poisoned Aridea. Shortly afterward, Prince Fredefalk died in a strange hunting accident, and Aridea’s eldest son disappeared without a word. That must have been the little one’s doing, too. I say ‘little’ but she was seventeen by then. And she was pretty well-developed.