Going back to Riverdell, permit me, dear reader, a digression concerning historical processes. The history of a given territory is often created and formed by accident, as a side effect of the conflicts between external forces. A given land’s history is very often created by foreigners. Foreigners are the cause–but the effects are always invariably borne by the local people.

That rule fully applied to Riverdell.

Riverdell had its own folk, indigenous Riverdellers. The unceasing years of scrambles and struggles had transformed them into beggars and forced them to migrate. Their villages and settlements had gone up in smoke, and the ruins of homesteads and fields were transformed into fallow land and swallowed up by the wilderness. Trade fell into decline and caravans avoided the neglected roads and tracks. The few Riverdellers who remained turned into coarse boors. They mainly differed from wolverines and bears by the fact that they wore britches. At least some of them did. I mean some of them wore britches and some of them differed from the beasts. They were–generally speaking–an unobliging, crude and boorish nation.

And utterly devoid of a sense of humour.

The dark-haired daughter of the forest beekeeper tossed her plait over her shoulder, and resumed turning the quern with furious vigour. Dandelion’s efforts were in vain; the poet’s words seemed not to register with their audience. Dandelion winked at the rest of the company, pretending to sigh and raise his eyes to the ceiling. But he did not quit.

‘Let me,’ he repeated, grinning. ‘Let me grind, while you fetch some ale from the cellar. There must be a hidden cellar somewhere around here and a keg in the vault. Am I right, fair one?’

‘You might leave the wench alone, m’lord,’ the forest beekeeper’s wife–a tall, willowy woman of astonishing beauty–said crossly as she busied herself around the kitchen. ‘I already told ‘ee there ain’t no ale ‘ere.’

‘You bin told near a dozen times, m’lord,’ the forest beekeeper said, backing up his wife, breaking off from his conversation with the Witcher and the vampire. ‘I shall make you pancakes with honey, and then you’ll eat. But leave the wench in peace to grind the corn for meal, for without meal even a sorcerer cannot make a pancake! Let ‘er be, let ‘er grind in peace.’

‘Did you hear that, Dandelion?’ called the Witcher. ‘Leave the girl alone and go and do something useful. Or write your memoirs!’

‘I fancy a drink. I fancy a drink before eating. I have some herbs, I’ll brew myself an infusion. Granny, would there be any hot water in this cottage? Hot water, I’m asking. Would there be any?’

An old woman, the forest beekeeper’s mother, sitting on the stove bench, raised her head from the sock she was darning.

‘There would, petal, there would,’ she muttered. ‘Only it be cold b’ now.’