Since Vysogota’s younger days only one thing had changed–growing emancipation. Not only teenage boys, but also reckless girls, preferring a horse, a sword and adventures to lace-making, the spinning wheel and waiting for the matchmakers.

Vysogota did not say all that straight out. He said it in a roundabout way, but so that she knew that he knew. To make her aware that if someone in the cottage was an enigma, it was certainly not her–a young thug from a band of underage thugs who had miraculously escaped a manhunt. A disfigured teenage girl trying to cloak herself in an aura of mystery…

‘You don’t know who I am. But don’t worry. I’ll be leaving shortly. I won’t put you at risk.’

Vysogota had had enough.

‘I’m not at risk,’ he said dryly. ‘For what peril would there be? Even if a search party were to show up here, which I doubt, what ill could befall me? Giving help to fugitive criminals is punishable, but not for a hermit, since a hermit is unaware of worldly matters. It is my privilege to give asylum to anyone who comes to my retreat. You said it correctly: I don’t know who you are. How am I, a hermit, to know who you are, what mischief you’ve been up to and why the law is pursuing you? And which law? For I don’t even know what law applies in this region, or what and whose jurisdiction I live in. And it does not concern me. I am a hermit.’

He had mentioned the hermit’s life a few too many times; he sensed it. But he did not quit. Her furious green eyes pricked him like spurs.

‘I am a penniless anchorite. Dead to the world and its concerns. I’m a simple, uneducated man, unaware of worldly matters…’

That was an exaggeration.

‘Like hell you are!’ she yelled, hurling a pelt and the knife to the floor. ‘Do you take me for a fool? I’m not a fool, be sure of that. A hermit, a penniless anchorite? I had a look around when you weren’t here. I looked in the corner, behind that rather filthy curtain. How did learned books get on those shelves, eh, my simple, ignorant man?’

Vysogota threw a coypu skin down on the pile.

‘A tax collector once lived here,’ he said light-heartedly. ‘They are cadasters and bookkeeping ledgers.’

‘You’re lying,’ Ciri grimaced, massaging her scar. ‘You’re lying through your teeth!’

He did not reply, pretending to be assessing the hue of another hide.

‘Perhaps you think,’ the girl began again, ‘that if you have a white beard, wrinkles and you’ve lived a hundred years, you can easily hoodwink a naive young maid, eh? Let me tell you: maybe you would have tricked just any lass. But I’m not just any lass.’

He raised his eyebrows in a wordless, but provocative, question. He didn’t have to wait long.