Ascension Day, Reynevan quickly calculated, forty days after Easter, falls on the thirteenth day of May. So today is the eleventh. I was wounded on the eighth. That means I was unconscious for three days.

“You say, Brother, that the Tábor is leaving Silesia?” He continued to pry. “Does that mean the end of the expedition? That we’ve stopped fighting?”

“Were you told not to talk politics?” A woman’s voice sounded. “You were. So please do not. Please pray. To God for your health. And for the souls of this hospital’s founders. And please remember our benefactors and donors in your prayers. Come on, Brethren in Christ! Whoever can stand, to the chapel!”

He knew that voice.

“You’re conscious, m’Lord Lancelot. Finally. I’m glad.”

“Dorota…” He sighed, recognising her. “Dorota Faber…”

“It’s nice of you to recognise me, m’lord.” The harlot smiled at him sweetly. “Nice indeed. I’m glad you’ve finally awoken… Oh, and the pillow isn’t so stained with blood today… So perhaps you’ll recover. Let’s change the dressing. Elencza!”

“Sister Dorota…” grunted someone from the other wall. “Me leg’s hurting me dreadful—”

“There’s no leg there, son, I told you. Elencza, over here.”

He didn’t recognise her right away. Perhaps it was the fever, or perhaps the time that had passed, but for a long while he looked uncomprehendingly at the fair-haired, thin-lipped young woman with pale, watery eyes. With the once-plucked eyebrows growing slowly back.

It took some time for him to realise who she was. It helped that the young woman clearly knew who he was. He saw it in her anxious look.

“The daughter of Lord Stietencron… The Goleniowskie Forests. Ścibor’s Clearing… You’re alive? You survived?”

She nodded, smoothing her apron with a nervous movement. And he suddenly understood where the fear in her eyes came from, where the terrified grimace and trembling of her narrow mouth.

“It wasn’t I…” he mumbled. “It wasn’t I who robbed the tax collector… I had nothing to do with it… Everything you’ve heard… Everything you’ve heard about me is rumour and falsehood—”

“That’s enough talk.” Dorota Faber cut him off seemingly sternly. “Time to change the dressing. Help me, Elencza.”

They tried to be gentle, but in spite of that, he hissed in pain and groaned loudly several times. When they unwound the bandages, he wanted to see the wound but was unable to lift his head. A diagnosis by touch had to suffice. And by smell. Neither diagnosis was promising.

“It’s festering,” Dorota Faber confirmed calmly. Her face was bathed in an aura of saintliness in the beam of sunlight shining through the small window. “It’s festering,” she repeated. “And swelling. Ever since the barber-surgeon removed the splinters of the bolt. But it’s better than it was. Better, m’Lord Lancelot.”