Geralt didn’t lower his eyes, but steadily returned the burning gaze of the prefect’s only eye.

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘No. Not for the time being.’

‘Then the purpose and direction of my travel is my private business.’

‘I suggest frankness and openness, nonetheless. If only in order to prove you don’t feel in any way guilty and don’t fear either the law, or any authority guarding it. I’ll repeat the question: what is behind your expedition, witcher?’

Geralt pondered this briefly.

‘I’m trying to reach the druids who were abiding in Angren, but have probably moved into these parts. It would have been easy to learn that from the beekeepers I was escorting.’

‘Who hired you to deal with the druids? The guardians of nature haven’t burned one too many people in the Wicker Woman, have they?’

‘Fairy tales, rumours, superstitions. Strange for an enlightened person like yourself. I want information from the druids, not their blood. But really, prefect, it seems to me I’ve been too frank, in order to prove I don’t feel guilty.’

‘It’s not about your guilt. At least not just about it. I’d like, nevertheless, a tone of mutual congeniality to prevail in our talk. For in spite of appearances, the aim of this talk is, among others, to save you and your companions’ lives.’

‘You have provoked my sincere curiosity, m’lord prefect,’ answered Geralt after some time, ‘Among other things. I shall hear out your explanations with truly rapt attention.’

‘I don’t doubt it. We’ll get to those explanations, but gradually. In stages. Have you ever heard, master witcher, of the tradition of turning imperial evidence? Do you know what that is?’

‘I do. Weaselling out of one’s responsibilities by fingering one’s comrades.’

‘A gross simplification,’ Fulko Artevelde said without smiling, ‘typical, actually, for a Nordling. You often disguise gaps in your education with sarcastic or exaggerated simplifications which you consider witty. Imperial law operates here in the Slopes, master witcher. More precisely, imperial law is going to operate here when rank lawlessness has been utterly extirpated. The best way to fight lawlessness and criminality is the scaffold, which you surely saw in the town square. But occasionally the offer to turn imperial evidence also works.’

He made a dramatic pause. Geralt didn’t interrupt.

‘Quite recently,’ the prefect continued, ‘we managed to lure a gang of juvenile criminals into an ambush. The brigands offered resistance and were killed…’

‘But not all of them, right?’ Geralt conjectured, bluntly, becoming a little bored by all this oratory. ‘One was taken alive. They were promised a reprieve if they turned imperial evidence. I mean if they started grassing. And they grassed me up.’

‘Why such a deduction? Have you had any contact with the local criminal underworld? Now or in the past?’