‘It wasn’t like that at all!’ Ciri yelled from the table, able to react to the pain by shouting. ‘We showed the baron’s daughter contempt and disrespect by letting her get away with it! The wench should have been ravaged!’

‘Indeed.’ Ciri sensed Hotspurn’s gaze on her naked thighs. ‘Verily a great dishonour not to have ravaged her. No wonder then, that the offended Casadei has assembled an armed squad and offered a reward. He has sworn publicly that you will all hang head down from the corbels on the walls of his castle. He also swore that for the brooch wrenched from his daughter he will flay Miss Falka. Alive.’

Ciri swore, and the Rats roared in wild laughter. Iskra sneezed and covered herself in snot; the fisstech was irritating her mucous membranes.

‘We disdain our pursuers,’ she declared, wiping her nose, mouth, chin and the table. ‘The prefect, the baron, the Varnhagens! They can hunt us, but they won’t catch us! We are the Rats! We zigzagged back and forth on the far side of the Velda and now those dolts are at sixes and sevens, going the wrong way along a cold trail. They will have gone too far to turn around by the time they catch on.’

‘Let them turn around!’ Asse said heatedly. He had returned some time before from sentry duty. No one had replaced him and no one seemed about to. ‘We’ll slaughter them and that’s that!’

‘Exactly!’ Ciri screamed from the table, having already forgotten how they had fled from their pursuers through the villages beside the Velda and how terrified she had been.

‘Very well.’ Giselher slammed his open palm down on the table, abruptly putting an end to the noisy chatter. ‘Speak, Hotspurn. For I can see you wish to tell us something else, something of greater note than the prefect, the Varnhagens, the Baron of Casadei and his sensitive daughter.’

‘Bonhart is on your trail.’

A very long silence fell. Even Master Almavera stopped working for a moment.

‘Bonhart,’ Giselher repeated in a slow, drawling voice. ‘That grey-haired old blackguard? We must have really annoyed someone.’

‘Someone wealthy,’ Mistle added. ‘Not everyone can afford Bonhart.’

Ciri was about to ask who this Bonhart was, but Asse and Reef–speaking almost at once, in unison–were quicker.

‘He’s a bounty hunter,’ Giselher explained grimly. ‘Years ago he took the king’s shilling, they say. Then he was a wandering merchant, and finally began killing people for the bounty. He’s a whoreson like no other.’

‘They say,’ Kayleigh said quite carelessly, ‘that if you wanted to bury everyone Bonhart has put to the sword in one graveyard, it would have to measure a good half-acre.’

Mistle poured a pinch of the white powder into the dimple between her thumb and forefinger, and sniffed it up vigorously.