At first, during the flight, Reynevan had planned to escape immediately, and right after landing he was still wondering how to get away as quickly as possible, descend the mountain and vanish. Nothing came of it. They had landed in a throng which carried them away like a current. Any step in a different direction would have been conspicuous and aroused suspicion. He judged it would be better not to.

“Aucassin.” Nicolette cuddled up to him, clearly sensing what he was thinking. “Do you know the saying: out of the frying pan into the fire?”

“Fear not,” he said, overcoming his constricted throat. “Fear not, Nicolette. I won’t let any harm come to you. I’ll get you out of here. And I certainly won’t abandon you.”

“I know,” she replied at once, so trustingly and warmly he immediately regained his courage and confidence—qualities that, to be frank, had almost utterly deserted him. He raised his head bravely and courteously offered the girl his arm, then looked around with a brave, even arrogant, expression.

They were overtaken by a hamadryad smelling of wet bark and passed a buck-toothed dwarf whose naked belly, shining like a watermelon, stuck out from beneath a short waistcoat. Reynevan had seen a similar dwarf before. In the cemetery in Wąwolnica, the night after Peterlin’s funeral.

More flyers of both genders were landing on the soft slope beneath a cliff, their numbers constantly growing, slowly adding to the crush. Fortunately, the organisers had taken care of order and designated stewards were directing the arrivals to a clearing where they could deposit brooms and other flying equipment in a specially made enclosure. They had to wait in a queue for a while. Nicolette squeezed his arm harder when a thin creature in a shroud—smelling quite corpse-like—joined the queue behind them. In front of them were two rusalkas with hair full of dry ears of corn, stamping their little feet impatiently and nervously.

A moment later, a fat kobold took Reynevan’s bench from him and gave him a receipt—a freshwater mussel shell with a magical ideogram and the Roman numeral CLXXIII painted on it.

“Look after it,” he snarled routinely. “Don’t lose it. I’m not going to search all over the place if you do.”

Nicolette cuddled tightly to him and squeezed his hand, this time for a more specific and obvious reason that Reynevan had also noticed.

They had suddenly become the centre of—by no means well-disposed—attention. Several witches were staring at them evilly. Beside them, Formosa of Krossig would have seemed a pretty young thing and a rare beauty.