Balbulus coughed, wheezed and choked for a while. But Ofka didn’t translate, so it couldn’t have been speech, just ordinary coughing. The old man finally took a breath, grimaced like a demon and struck his cane against the floor, then gurgled horribly. Ofka listened, sucking the end of her plait.

“But Nicolaus was the family’s hope,” she translated. “Was of my blood, the blood of the Sterczas, not the dregs of the Devil knows what mongrel couplings. So the killer will have to pay for Nicolaus’s spilled blood. With interest.”

Tammo banged his cane against the floor again. It fell from his shaking hand. The Lord of Sterzendorf coughed and sneezed, spraying saliva and snot around. Hrozwita of Baruth, Balbulus’s daughter and Ofka’s mother, who was standing alongside, wiped his chin, picked up the cane and pressed it into his hand.

“Hgrrrhhh! Grhhh… Bbb… bhrr… bhrrrllg…”

“Reinmar of Bielawa will pay me back for Nicolaus,” Ofka translated unemotionally. “He will pay, as God and all the saints are my witnesses. I will lock him up in a dungeon, in a cage, in a chest like the one the Duke of Głogów cast Henry the Fat into, so small he won’t even be able to scratch himself, with one hole for food and another directly opposite. And I’ll keep him like that for half a year. And only then go to work on him. And I’ll bring a torturer all the way from Magdeburg, because they have excellent men there, not like the ones here in Silesia, where the rascal expires on the second day. Oh, no, I’ll get hold of a master who’ll devote to Nicolaus’s killer a week. Or two.”

Apeczko Stercza swallowed.

“But to do that,” Ofka continued, “we must seize the adulterer. Which demands intelligence. Wits. Because the adulterer is no fool. A fool wouldn’t have graduated from Prague, or ingratiated himself with the Oleśnica friars, or have so ably seduced Gelfrad’s French wife. With a crafty one like that, it’s not enough to chase up and down the Wrocław road like an idiot, making a fool of oneself. Giving the affair renown that will serve the rake—and not us.”

Apeczko nodded. Ofka looked at him and sniffed and wiped her little snub nose.

“The adulterer,” she translated on, “has a brother, residing on an estate somewhere near Henryków. It’s quite likely he’ll seek shelter there. Perhaps he already has. Another Bielawa, before he died, was a priest at the Wrocław Collegiate, so it’s conceivable the rascal will want to hide with another rascal. I mean to say with His Excellency, the Most Reverend Bishop Konrad, that old soak and thief!”

Hrozwita of Baruth once again wiped the old man’s chin, which was covered in snot after his furious outburst.