Chapter 7: Gerolt's Declination

The morning came the way mornings came in river towns in late autumn — sideways, grey, with a kind of personal hostility. Gerolt was already at the elder's house when the light was still deciding whether to bother.

He had not slept. This was not unusual. Witchers did not require sleep the way ordinary men required it, their mutations having renegotiated that particular contract years ago, but he had lain on the inn's narrow mattress and stared at the ceiling and listened to Ashford breathe in the dark, and what he had heard in that breathing had not inclined him toward rest. The village had the specific quality of a thing stretched too long over a frame it no longer fit. He had heard villages like that before. They broke in predictable ways.

He knocked on Tomak's door at the hour when reasonable men were eating their morning bread, which was deliberate. Reasonable men were easier to handle when their mouths were occupied with something other than words.