“I asked around,” he said. “They were here yesterday—Wolfher of Stercza and five other men. Those Greater Poles over there, they said the Sterczas had stopped them but didn’t dare try anything with these clergymen. They are clearly searching for you on the Wrocław highway. In your shoes, I’d flee.”

“Kantner,” Reynevan mumbled, “will defend me…”

Ebersbach shrugged. “It is your decision. And your neck. Wolfher is proclaiming loudly and in detail what he’ll do to you when he catches you. If I were you—”

“Firstly, I love Adèle and I will not abandon her!” Reynevan burst out. “And secondly… Where do you suppose I could escape to? To Poland? Or perhaps Samogitia?”

“Not a bad idea. About Samogitia, I mean.”

“Bugger!” said Reynevan, kicking a hen that was bustling around his legs. “Very well. I’ll think about it. And make a plan. But first I’ll eat something. I’m dying of hunger, and the smell of cabbage is killing me.”

Had they delayed any longer, the young men would have ended up with nothing. Pots of kasha and cabbage with peas and bowls of meaty pork bones had been placed on the high table, before the duke and his daughter. The dishes only headed to the other end of the table after the three clergymen sitting closest to Kantner—who, it turned out, were good trenchermen—had eaten their fill. On the way, to make matters worse, was Rudiger Haugwitz, who was no slouch, either, and the duke’s foreign guest. The black-haired knight’s face was so swarthy he might have only just returned from the Holy Land, and he was even broader-shouldered than Haugwitz. Thus, by the time the bowls reached the lower-ranking and younger men, there was almost nothing left in them. Fortunately, a moment later, the innkeeper gave the duke a huge board of capons, which looked and smelled so tasty that the cabbage and pork fat lost some of their appeal and reached the end of the table almost intact.

The Duke’s daughter Agnieszka nibbled a capon leg with her little teeth, trying to stop the grease from dripping on the fashionably slashed sleeves of her dress. The men discoursed about this and that. It was the turn of one of the clergymen, the Dominican Jan Nejedlý of Vysoké.

“I am,” he sermonized, “or rather was the prior of Saint Clement’s in Prague Old Town and a Master at Charles University. Now, though, as you see, I am an exile, dependant on someone’s else’s generosity. My monastery was plundered, and I fell out of favour at the academy with apostates and scoundrels like Jan of Příbram and Křišťan of Prachatice, may God strike them down—”

“There is among us,” Kantner interrupted in mid-sentence, catching Reynevan’s gaze, “a student from Prague.”