But that was not possible. No one could have seen it. The cottage of old Vysogota was well hidden among the reeds in the swamp. In a wilderness permanently covered in mist, where no one dared to venture.

‘The stream’s valley was level, and good for riding, so Kelpie ran like the wind. Of course, I wasn’t riding uphill but downstream. I remembered that curious name: Jealousy. I recalled what Hotspurn had said to Giselher at the station. I understood why he had warned me about that village. There must have been an ambush in Jealousy. When Giselher made light of the offer of the amnesty and working for the guild, Hotspurn deliberately mentioned the bounty hunter quartered in the village. He knew the Rats would swallow the bait, ride there and fall into the trap. I had to get to Jealousy before them, cut off their route and warn them. Turn them back. All of them. Or at least just Mistle.’

‘I conclude,’ Vysogota mumbled, ‘that you didn’t manage to.’

‘At that time,’ she said softly, ‘I thought that a large force, armed to the teeth, was waiting in Jealousy. In my wildest dreams it never occurred to me that the trap was a single man…’

She was silent, staring into the gloom.

‘Nor did I have any idea what kind of man he was.’

Birka had once been a wealthy village, charming and picturesquely situated–its yellow thatch and red tiles crowded into a valley with steep, forested sides, which changed colour with the seasons. In autumn, especially, Birka delighted the artistic eye and sensitive heart.

It was like that until the settlement changed its name. Here is what happened:

A young farmer from a nearby elven colony was madly in love with the miller’s daughter from Birka. The miller’s prankish daughter ridiculed the elf’s wooing and continued to sleep around with neighbours, friends and even relatives. They began to mock the elf and his blind love. The elf–somewhat untypically for his race–exploded with anger and vengeance, exploded horribly. One night, with a strong wind blowing the right way, he started a fire and burned Birka down.

The victims of the fire, now ruined, lost heart. Some roamed the world and others fell into idleness and drunkenness. The money gathered for the rebuilding of the village was regularly defrauded and squandered on drink, and the settlement became a vision of misery and despair: it was a jumble of ghastly, carelessly thrown together shacks beneath the bare and black-charred slope of the valley. Before the fire Birka had been oval-shaped, with a central square; now the few solidly built houses, granaries and a distillery formed something like a long main street, which was topped by the façade of The Chimera’s Head, built by the efforts of the community and kept by the widow Goulue.