Oddly, it was only then that she noticed the small escutcheon on his enamel gorget.

A silver unicorn rampant on a black field.

A unicorn.

Ciri lowered her head. She looked at her sword’s openwork recasso.

Everything suddenly went quiet.

‘By the Great Sun,’ Declan Ros aep Maelchlad, the captain of the Nilfgaardian reserve horse, abruptly began. ‘No. Don’t do that, girl. Ne tuv’en que’ss, luned!’

Ciri slowly turned Swallow around in her hand and rested the pommel on the sand. She went down on one knee. Holding the blade with her right hand, she aimed the point with her left towards her breastbone. The blade cut through her clothing and pricked her at once.

Just don’t cry, thought Ciri, pushing harder and harder down on the sword. Just don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry over. One quick thrust and it will all be over… It will all be over…

‘You won’t do it.’ Bonhart’s voice resounded in the complete silence. ‘You won’t do it, witcher girl. In Kaer Morhen you were taught how to kill, so you kill like a machine. Instinctively. To kill yourself you need character, strength, determination and courage. And they couldn’t teach you that.’

‘He was right,’ Ciri said with effort. ‘I couldn’t.’

Vysogota remained silent. He was holding a coypu pelt. Motionless. Had been for a long time. He had almost forgotten about the pelt as he listened.

‘I chickened out. I was a coward. And I paid for it. As every coward pays for it. In pain, dishonour and hideous humiliation. And an absolute revulsion towards myself.’

Vysogota said nothing.

Had someone crept up to the cottage with the sunken thatched roof that night, had they peered through the slits in the shutters, they would have seen in the dimly lit interior a grey-bearded old man and an ashen-haired girl sitting by the fireplace. They would have noticed that the two of them were staring silently into the glowing, ruby coals.

But no one could have seen it. For the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof was well hidden among the fog and the mist, in a boundless swamp in the Pereplut Marshes where no one dared to venture.

CHAPTER FIVE

Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

Genesis, 9:6

Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice.

Vysogota of Corvo

‘What seeks the Witcher on my territory?’ Fulko Artevelde, the Prefect of Riedbrune, repeated the question, now clearly impatient with the lengthening silence. ‘Whence is the Witcher coming? And whither is he headed? With what purpose?’