‘I saw her too.’ Triss pursed her lips. ‘We had the same dream, you, I and Nenneke. Not a word about it.’

‘Blood on her face… So much blood—’

‘Be silent, I say. Nenneke approaches.’

The high priestess joined them. She looked weary. She shook her head in answer to Triss’s wordless question. Seeing that Jarre had opened his mouth, she forestalled him.

‘Nothing, sadly. Almost all the girls awoke when the Wild Hunt flew over the temple, but none of them had a vision. Not even one as hazy as ours. Go to bed, lad, you cannot help. Back to the dormitory, girls.’

She rubbed her face and eyes with both hands.

‘Oh… The Equinox! This accursed night… Go to bed, Triss. We can do nothing.’

The sorceress clenched her fists. ‘This helplessness is driving me to insanity. The thought that somewhere she is suffering, bleeding, that she’s in peril… If I only knew what to do, dammit!’

Nenneke, high priestess of the temple of Melitele, turned around.

‘Have you tried praying?’

In the South, far beyond the mountains of Amell, in Ebbing, in the land called Pereplut, on the vast marshes crisscrossed by the rivers Velda, Lete and Arete, in a place eight hundred miles as the crow flies from the city of Ellander and the temple of Melitele, a nightmare jerked the old hermit Vysogota from sleep. Once awake, Vysogota could not for the life of him recall his dream, but a weird unease prevented him from falling asleep again.

‘It’s cold, cold, cold,’ said Vysogota to himself, as he tramped along a path among the reeds. ‘It’s cold, cold, brrr.’

Yet another trap was empty. Not a single muskrat. A most unsuccessful night. Vysogota cleaned sludge and duckweed from the trap, muttering curses and sniffing through his frozen nostrils.

‘It’s cold, brrr, hooeee!’ he said, walking towards the edge of the swamp. ‘And September not yet over! It’s but four days after the Equinox! Ah, I don’t recall such chills at the end of September, not for as long as I’ve lived. And I’ve lived a long time!’

The next–and penultimate–trap was also empty. Vysogota didn’t even feel like cursing.

‘There’s no doubt,’ he wittered on, as he walked, ‘that the climate grows colder with every passing year. And now it looks as though the cooling will progress apace. Ha, the elves predicted that long since, but who believed in elven forecasts?’