‘Returning to the dressing of the wound,’ the old man began again, staring at the flickering and smoking candle flame, ‘let us write as follows: I did not excise the edges of the cut, I limited myself to the removal of shreds of dead tissue and coagulated blood. I bathed the wound with willow bark extract. I removed dirt and foreign bodies. I put in sutures. Hemp sutures. Let it be written that I did not have any other kinds of thread at my disposal. I used a poultice of wolfsbane and applied a formed muslin dressing.’

A mouse scampered out into the middle of the chamber. Vysogota threw it a piece of bread. The girl on the pallet breathed restlessly and groaned in her sleep.

‘Eighth hour following my intervention. Condition of the patient–unchanged. Condition of the doctor… I mean my condition… has improved, since I have enjoyed a little sleep… I can continue my notes. It behoves me to commit onto these leaves some information about my patient. For posterity. Assuming that posterity reaches these swamps before everything decays and crumbles into dust.’

Vysogota sighed heavily, dipped his quill and wiped it on the edge of his inkwell.

‘As far as the patient is concerned,’ he muttered, ‘let the following be noted down. Age, I would say, around sixteen. Tall, strikingly slim build, but by no means puny, no indication of undernourishment. Musculature and physical construction rather typical for a young elf-woman, but no mixed-blood traits found… Can’t be more than one eighth elven. A smaller proportion of elven blood may, of course, not leave any traces.’

Vysogota only now seemed to have realised that he hadn’t written a single word on the page. He put his quill to the parchment, but the ink had dried. The old man was not bothered in the slightest.

‘May it be noted,’ he continued, ‘that the girl has had no children. I emphasise: I refer to old scars. No shortage of fresh wounds on her body. The girl has been beaten. Flogged, and by various means, probably at her father’s hand. She has probably also been kicked.

‘I also found on her body quite a strange distinguishing mark… Hmmm… Let’s write this down, for the good of science… The girl has a red rose tattooed on her loins, right by the pubic mound.’

Vysogota stared at the sharpened quill point before dipping it into the inkwell. This time, though, he did not forget why he had done it–he quickly began to cover the page with even lines of sloping script. He wrote until the quill was dry.

‘She was talking and shouting in befuddlement,’ he said. ‘Her accent and way of expressing herself–if I pass over frequent interjections in profane criminal cant–are quite confusing, difficult to place, but I would risk the assertion that they originate rather from the North than the South. Some of the words…’