‘It’s true,’ Regis agreed, putting more birch branches on the campfire. ‘Our minstrel has become touchy, not to say secretive, discreet and loving of solitude recently. Oh, no, having witnesses when performing his natural needs doesn’t bother him at all which, in our situation, one cannot indeed be astonished by. His shameful secrecy and oversensitivity to being watched extends solely to his scribbled notes. Is, perhaps, a poem being written in our presence? A rhapsody? An epic? A romance? A canzone?’

‘No,’ Geralt retorted, shifting towards the fire and muffling his back with a blanket. ‘I know him. It can’t be verse, because he’s not cursing, mumbling or counting the syllables on his fingers. He’s writing in silence, so it must be prose.’

‘Prose!’ The vampire flashed his pointed fangs–which he usually tried not to do. ‘A novel, perhaps? Or an essay? A morality play? Dammit, Dandelion! Don’t torture us so! Reveal what you are writing.’

‘My memoirs.’

‘Your what?’

‘From these notes,’ Dandelion displayed a tube stuffed with paper, ‘will arise the work of my life. My memoirs, bearing the title Fifty Years of Poetry.’

‘Nonsensical title,’ Cahir declared dryly. ‘Poetry has no age.’

‘And if one concedes that it does,’ added the vampire, ‘it is decidedly older than that.’

‘You don’t understand. The title means that the author of the work has spent fifty years, no more and no less, in the service of Lady Poetry.’

‘In that case, it’s even more nonsensical,’ said the Witcher. ‘You aren’t even forty yet. Your writing ability was thrashed into you in the temple elementary school, at the age of eight. Even if we allow that you were writing rhymes in school, you’ve not been serving Lady Poetry for longer than thirty years. But as I well know, for you’ve often told me about it, you only began seriously rhyming and composing melodies when you were nineteen, inspired by your love for Countess de Stael. That makes it the nineteenth year of your service, Dandelion. So how did you come up with this titular fifty years? Is it meant to be some kind of metaphor?’

‘I,’ the bard said, puffing up, ‘trace broad horizons with my thought. I describe the present, but I pass into the future. I intend to publish this mighty work in some twenty or thirty years, and then no one will be able to cast doubt on the titular reckoning.’

‘Ha. Now I get it. If anything astonishes me, it’s the foresight. You aren’t usually bothered about tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow still doesn’t bother me much,’ the poet declared with superiority. ‘I’m thinking about posterity. About eternity!’

‘From the point of view of posterity,’ Regis observed, ‘it isn’t too ethical a beginning to write now, in advance. On the basis of the title, posterity has the right to expect a work written from a genuine fifty-year perspective, by a person with a genuine fifty-year store of knowledge and experience—’