‘Although both of us have managed to carry out something of a provisional inquisition, we still know nothing about each other. I don’t know who you are, you don’t know who I am…’

This time he waited with calculation. She looked at him, and in her eyes there was the hint of the question he was expecting. Something strange flashed in her eyes when she posed the question.

‘Who shall begin?’

Had someone had crept up after nightfall to the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof, had peered inside, in the firelight and glow of the hearth they would have seen a grey-bearded old man hunched over a pile of pelts. They would have seen an ashen-haired girl with a hideous scar on her cheek, a scar which in no way suited her huge green childlike eyes.

But no one could have seen that. For the cottage stood among reeds in a swamp where no one dared to venture.

‘My name is Vysogota of Corvo. I was once a doctor. A surgeon. I was an alchemist. I was a scholar, a historian, a philosopher and an ethicist. I was a professor at the Academy of Oxenfurt. I had to flee after publishing a paper which was deemed godless. At that time, fifty years ago, it was punishable by death. I had to emigrate. My wife did not want to emigrate, so she left me. And I only ceased my flight when I reached the far South, in the Nilfgaardian Empire. Later I finally became a lecturer in ethics at the Imperial Academy in Castell Graupian, a position I held for almost ten years. But I had to run from there, too, after the publication of another treatise… Incidentally, the work dealt with totalitarian power and the criminal character of imperialist wars, but officially I and my work were accused of metaphysical mysticism and clerical schism. It was ruled I had been goaded into action by the expansive and revisionist groups of priests who were actually governing the kingdoms of the Nordlings. Quite amusing in the light of my death sentence for atheism twenty years previously! Indeed, it so happened that the expansive priests in the North had long since been forgotten by their people, but that had not been acknowledged in Nilfgaard. Combining mysticism and superstition with politics was a severely punishable offence.

‘Today, looking back down the years, I think that had I humbled myself and shown remorse, perhaps the scandal would have blown over, and the emperor limited himself to disfavour, without using extreme measures. But I was bitter. I considered some of my arguments timeless, superior to this or that dominion or politics. I felt wronged, unjustly wronged. Tyrannously wronged. So I made active contact with the dissidents secretly fighting the tyrant. Before I knew it, I was in a dungeon with those dissidents, and some of them, when they were shown the torture instruments, pointed me out as the movement’s chief ideologue.