“Hey,” remarked Dorota Faber, “something’s going on down there. Is it a holiday today or something?”

Indeed, quite a large crowd had gathered outside the city wall, and a line of people were heading from the gate to join them.

“Looks like a procession of some kind,” Dorota guessed.

“A Mystery, more likely,” stated Granciszek, “for today’s the fourteenth of August, the Eve of the Assumption. On we go, Miss Dorota. Let’s see it close up.”

Dorota Faber clicked her tongue at the gelding. Urban Horn called his mastiff to heel and put him on a leash, clearly aware that in a crowd even a clever dog like Beelzebub might forget himself.

The procession, approaching from the city, came close enough to their vantage point for them to make out clergymen in their vestments, monks in the habits of their orders and a number of burghers in fur-lined coats that almost touched the ground. Also present were several mounted knights in tunics decorated with coats of arms, and a dozen or so halberdiers in yellow jerkins and dully gleaming kettle hats.

“The bishop’s men,” Urban Horn quietly informed them. “And that huge knight on the bay there, with the chequerboard emblem, is Henryk of Reideburg, the Starosta of Strzelin.”

The bishop’s soldiers were frogmarching three people, two men and a woman. The woman was dressed in a white shift, and one of the men was wearing a pointed, brightly painted cap.

Dorota Faber flicked the reins and yelled at the gelding and the crowd of townspeople who were reluctantly parting in front of the wagon. After descending the hill, the travellers were too low to see anything. When the throng became too dense to push through and the wagon stopped moving, they stood up for a better view.

Reynevan could now see the heads and shoulders of the three people, and the stakes they were tied to rising above their heads. The piles of brushwood stacked up around the stakes were out of his line of sight, but he knew they were there.

He heard a voice, loud and thunderous but indistinct, so muffled by the sounds of the crowd that Reynevan had difficulty making out any words.

“Crimes directed against the social order… Errores Hussita-rum… Fides haeretica… Blasphemy and sacrilege… Crimen… Proved during interrogation…”

“It would appear,” said Urban Horn, standing up in the stirrups, “that our dispute on the road regarding the punishment of heretical acts will soon be summarised before our very eyes.”

“It does.” Reynevan swallowed and asked the nearby townsfolk: “Hey, friends—who are they executing?”

“Erratics,” explained a man in beggar’s rags. “They’ve caught some erratics. They say they’re hussies or something—”

“Not hussies, horse sons,” corrected another, similarly ragged, with an identical Polish accent. “They’re going to be burned for sacrilege. For giving communion to horses.”