Ciri snorted with laughter and made a long-drawn-out, extremely rude noise with her lips.

‘Hey, little know-it-all!’ burst out the pockmarked man. ‘If it’s not to your liking, you know where the door is! No one’s forcing you to listen or look at the basilisk!’

‘That’s no basilisk!’

‘Oh, yeah? So what is it, Miss Know-It-All?’

‘It’s a wyvern,’ said Ciri, throwing away the pear stalk and licking her fingers. ‘It’s a common wyvern. Young, small, starving and dirty. But a wyvern, that’s all. Vyverne, in the Elder Speech.’

‘Oh, look at this!’ shouted the pockmarked man. ‘What a clever clogs! Shut your trap, because when I—’

‘I say,’ spoke up a fair-haired young man in a velvet beret and a squire’s doublet without a coat of arms. He had a delicate, pale girl in an apricot dress on his arm. ‘Not so fast, my good animal catcher! Do not threaten the noble lady, for I will readily tan your hide with my sword. And furthermore, something smacks of trickery here!’

‘What trickery, young sir knight?’ choked the pockmarked man. ‘She’s lying, the horri— I meant to say, the high-born young lady is in error. It is a basilisk!’

‘It’s a wyvern,’ repeated Ciri.

‘What do you mean, a Vernon! It’s a basilisk! Just look how menacing it is, how it hisses, how it bites at its cage! Look at those teeth! It’s got teeth, I tell you, like—’

‘Like a wyvern,’ scowled Ciri.

‘If you’ve taken leave of your senses,’ said the pockmarked man, fixing her with a gaze that a real basilisk would have been proud of, ‘then come closer! Step up, and let it breathe on you! You laughed at its venom. Now let’s see you croak! Come along, step up!’

‘Not a problem,’ said Ciri, pulling her arm out of Fabio’s grasp and taking a step forward.

‘I shan’t allow it!’ cried the fair-haired squire, dropping his apricot companion’s arm and blocking Ciri’s way. ‘It cannot be! You are risking too much, fair lady.’

Ciri, who had never been addressed like that before, blushed a little, looked at the young man and fluttered her eyelids in a way she had tried out numerous times on the scribe Jarre.

‘There’s no risk whatsoever, noble knight,’ she smiled seductively, in spite of all Yennefer’s warnings, and reminders about the fable of the simpleton gazing foolishly at the cheese. ‘Nothing will happen to me. That so-called poisonous breath is claptrap.’

‘I would, however, like to stand beside you,’ said the youth, putting his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘To protect and defend… Will you allow me?’

‘I will,’ said Ciri, not knowing why the expression of rage on the apricot maiden’s face was causing her such pleasure.

‘It is I who shall protect and defend her!’ said Fabio, sticking his chest out and looking at the squire defiantly. ‘And I shall stand with her too!’