Ciri stroked the black cat, which had returned to the cottage in the swamp, as is customary with all cats in the world, when its love of freedom and dissolution had been undermined by cold, hunger and discomfort. Now it was lying in the girl’s lap and arching its back against her hand with a purr signifying profound bliss. The cat couldn’t have cared less about what the girl was saying.

‘It was the only time I dreamed of Geralt,’ Ciri began. ‘From the time we parted on the Isle of Thanedd, from the Tower of the Seagull, I’d never seen him in a dream. So I thought he was dead. And then suddenly came that dream, like the ones I used to have, dreams which Yennefer said were prophetic, precognitive; that they either show the past or the future. That was the day before the Equinox. In a small town whose name I don’t recall. In a cellar where Bonhart had locked me. After he’d flogged me and made me admit who I am.’

‘Did you divulge to him who you are?’ Vysogota raised his head. ‘Did you tell him everything?’

‘I paid for my cowardice,’ she swallowed, ‘with humiliation and self-contempt.’

‘Tell me about your dream.’

‘In it I saw a mountain; lofty, sheer, and sharp, like a stone knife. I saw Geralt. I heard what he was saying. Exactly. Every word, as though he were with me. I remember I wanted to call out and say it wasn’t like that at all, that none of it was true, that he’d made an awful mistake… That he’d got everything wrong! That it wasn’t the Equinox yet, so even if I happened to have died on the Equinox, he shouldn’t have declared me dead earlier, when I was still alive. And he shouldn’t have accused Yennefer or said such things about her…’

She was silent for a time, stroking the cat and sniffing hard.

‘But I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t even breathe… As though I was drowning. And I awoke. The last thing I saw, that I recall from that dream, was three riders. Geralt and two others, galloping along a ravine, with water gushing from its walls…’

Vysogota said nothing.

Had someone crept up to the shack with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof after nightfall, had they peered through the gaps in the shutters, they would have seen a grey-bearded old man listening raptly to a story told by an ashen-haired girl in the dimly lit interior, her cheek disfigured by a nasty scar.

They would have seen a black cat lying on the girl’s lap, purring lazily, demanding to be stroked–to the delight of the mice scampering around the room.