Werner Dorfinger, one of the Chojnik vassals, cast Reynevan a grim look. “If, God save us, they come for us… Are we going to fight over him or what?”

“What will be, will be,” Schaff interjected. “And what will be is what I decide. Clear?”

They devoured such quantities of the meat scraps fried in lard that they could barely move and felt they had no room for anything else. That state endured until the housewife began to spoon boiled jitrnice liver sausage and blood pudding stuffed with barley groats out of a cauldron. Barely had it cooled a little than they fell on it like wolves.

“Christ the Lord…” Dorfinger loosened his belt by another two holes. “It’s a long time since I tasted such jitrnice… Ha, I’ll have some more, but I must just go behind the barn.”

“Take your sheepskin,” advised Ralf Moser, the other vassal from Chojnik, as he emerged from the vestibule, shaking snow from his hat and collar. “It’s snowing out. And the wind’s howling like a damned soul.”

“Well, it’s true.” Schaff grinned. “Zwicker was hanged, after all. And the wind doesn’t know, either, that it wasn’t of his free will.”

“Damned priest…” Moser choked on the steam and smoke and coughed. “Damned priest can still do us some mischief beyond the grave…”

“Help us, I’d say,” said Gwido Buschbach, disagreeing, giving an intrusive goat trying to nibble his boot a kick. “For if somebody has it in for us, they’ll easily guess which way we’re headed. They might waylay us on a mountain pasture below Szrenica. They might be waiting for us at Borówczane rocks. They might plan to catch us near the upper reaches of the Szklarka, before we ride down into the Wrzosówka valley… But in a raging blizzard, God willing, we might slip through somehow… Pass me the blood pudding…”

“I’ll have some, too,” Schaff said. “By Saint Maurice, patron saint of knights… Delicious. Is there none left?”

“There is, m’lord, there is.”

“There you are, good fellow, another penny… I say! Where are you going, Bielawa?”

“I have to go behind the barn.”

“Go with him, Moser. So he doesn’t get any foolish ideas.”

“But I’m back in the warm,” the burgman protested. “Where can he go? In a snowstorm, in the winter? Among wolves and monsters? To a certain death? He’s not a fool, after all!”

“Go, I said.”

Snowstorm or not, wolves or not, Reynevan didn’t care. He had to escape and this was the only chance. Now, at night, when Schaff and his men were sated, indolent and drowsy. While Moser was exchanging a few words and coarse jokes with Dorfinger as they passed each other in the dark of the hallway, Reynevan grabbed his sheepskin. And a heavy weight from a set of scales standing there.