Andrzej Sapkowski

“Don't grin like an idiot.” The priestess rose and took a bag of dressings from the chest of drawers. Despite her weight and low stature, she moved swiftly and gracefully. “There's nothing funny about it. You're losing your reflexes, Geralt.”

“You're exaggerating.”

“I’m not exaggerating at all.” Nenneke spread a greenish mush smelling sharply of eucalyptus over the wound. “You shouldn't have allowed yourself to get wounded, but you did, and very seriously at that. Fatally even. And even with your exceptional powers of regeneration it'll be months before your neck is fully mobile again. I warn you, don't test your strength by fighting an agile opponent during that time.”

“Thank you for the warning. Perhaps you could give me some advice, too: how am I supposed to live in the meantime? Rally a few girls, buy a cart and organize a traveling house of ill-repute?”

“If you know that, then why your reservations about the trance? What are you afraid of? That I’ll make you bow your head to a statue and sing canticles? Geralt, we'll simply sit together for a while—you, me and Iola—and see if the girl's talents will let her see into the vortex of power surrounding you. Maybe we'll discover something worth knowing. And maybe we won't discover anything. Maybe the power and fate surrounding you won't choose to reveal themselves to us, will remain hidden and incomprehensible. I don't know. But why shouldn't we try?”

“Because there's no point. I’m not surrounded by any vortex or fate. And if I were, why the hell would I delve into it?”

“Geralt, you're sick.”

“Injured, you mean.”

“I know what I mean. There's something not quite right with you. I can sense that. After all, I have known you ever since you were a youngster. When I met you, you came up to my waist. And now I feel that you're spinning around in some damned whirlpool, tangled up in a slowly tightening noose. I want to know what's happening. But I can't do it myself. I have to count on Iola's gifts.”

Don't you think”—he smiled—“that my lack of faith makes such a trance pointless?”

“No, I don't. And do you know why?”

“No.”

Nenneke leaned over and looked him in the eyes with a strange smile on her pale lips.

“Because it would be the first proof I’ve ever heard of that a lack of faith has any kind of power at all.”

There's a grain of truth in every fairy tale,”

to think that there are people who don't believe in destiny. Unless you knew about me. Did you?”

“No, I didn't. It's the last place I could have expected you. If my memory serves me correctly, you used to live in a similar tower in Kovir.”

“Destiny has many faces. Mine is beautiful on the outside and hideous on the inside. She has stretched her bloody talons toward me—”

“You've not changed a bit, Stregobor.” Geralt grimaced. “You're talking nonsense while making wise and meaningful faces. Can't you speak normally?”

“I can,” sighed the wizard. “I can if that makes you happy. I made it all the way here, hiding and running from a monstrous being that wants to murder me. My escape proved in vain—it found me. In all probability, it's going to try to kill me tomorrow, or at the latest, the day after.”

I’m used to it. So why should a death threat impress me, and one directed at you at that?”

“Nonsense,” said the witcher. “And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.

I don't have anywhere else to run. I don't know where I could hide. The fact that you've arrived here exactly at this time can't be a coincidence. It's fate.”

The difference, my dear witcher, is that one who is bought is paid according to the buyer's whim, whereas one who renders a service sets his own price. Is that clear?”