‘But who,’ shouted someone in the crowd, ‘would give a halfling shelter? They should be hunted on their farms, and when they’re found, all those non-humans should be slung into the dungeons!’

‘To the gallows, not the dungeons!’

The town crier began to read further announcements issued by the burgrave and town council, and Ciri lost interest. She was just about to extricate herself from the crowd when she suddenly felt a hand on her bottom. A totally non-accidental, brazen and extremely skilled hand.

The crush ought to have prevented her from turning around to look, but in Kaer Morhen Ciri had learned how to manoeuvre in places that were difficult to move around in. She turned around, causing something of a disturbance. The young priest with the shaved head standing right behind her smiled an arrogant, rehearsed smile. ‘Right, then,’ said that smile, ‘what are we going to do now? You’ll blush sweetly and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?’

It was clear the priest had never had to deal with one of Yennefer’s pupils.

‘Keep your hands to yourself, baldy!’ yelled Ciri, white with rage. ‘Grab your own arse, you… You whitewashed tomb!’

Taking advantage of the fact that the priest was pinned in by the crowd and couldn’t move, she intended to kick him, but Fabio prevented that, hurriedly pulling her well away from the priest and the site of the incident. Seeing that she was trembling with rage, he treated her to a few fritters dusted with caster sugar, at the sight of which Ciri immediately calmed down and forgot about the incident. From where they were standing by the stall they had a view of a scaffold with a pillory, but with no criminal in it. The scaffold itself was decorated with garlands of flowers and was being used by a group of wandering minstrels, dressed up like parrots, sawing away vigorously at violins and playing flutes and bagpipes. A young black-haired woman in a sequined waistcoat sang and danced, shaking a tambourine and merrily stamping tiny slippers.

To bite a witch beside a path,

Some vipers did contrive.

The snakes all perished one by one,

The witch is still alive.

The crowd gathered around the scaffold laughed heartily and clapped along. The fritter seller threw another batch into the hot oil. Fabio licked his fingers and tugged Ciri away by the sleeve.

There were innumerable stalls and delicious foods were being offered everywhere. They each ate a cream bun, then shared a smoked eel, which they followed with something very strange, which had been fried and impaled on a skewer. After that, they stopped by some barrels of sauerkraut and pretended to be tasting it, as if intending to buy a large quantity. When they had eaten their fill but then didn’t buy anything the stallholder called them ‘a pair of little shits’.

They walked on. Fabio bought a small basket of bergamot pears with the rest of the money. Ciri looked up at the sky but decided it still wasn’t noon.