"Why wouldn't you travel by main roads?"

Episode 5, Bottled Appetites - Yennefer

So, Yennefer!

She's meeting with some guy, who's apparently named Hemet.

Hemet: "You're a wee bit shy."
Yennefer: "I've never been shy a day in my life. Count it again."
Hemet: "Times are shifting, my dear. My rates have gone up since last we spoke."

So we see here that things are sketchy. He's doing some weird power play where instead of saying the price went up directly, he says she doesn't have enough and only rewords it once she gets more aggressive.

"Shy" is, of course, quite the word choice.

1) Yennefer may be lying through her teeth that she's always been in control.
2) Yennefer may truthfully be saying that, in her opinion, she's always paid up.

I like the idea it's kind of both. What we're seeing here is establishing the persona Yennefer's made for dealing with people around her - and it is a stark departure from how she was acting in the previous episode, so this probably isn't who she was at court but something that came after the failure and near death experience. But also, Yennefer has paid and paid and paid. Again and again, she was told she had to do something, and she did it. She's tired of being told it's still not enough.

Hemet: "I've found more demand for my services."
Yennefer: "Then your customers will be awfully disappointed when they find a charred spot where you once stood."
Hemet: "None more so than yourself. You've come so far already. Just a few more...treatments should do the trick."

So Yennefer's been paying this guy, either with stored money (or items she's converting to funds) or by doing work of some kind. That she's bringing exactly enough money points toward the latter, but she could also be worried bringing extra money would get her robbed. And Hemet's about to bring up that she could get money by doing magic, so she apparently hasn't been doing that before now.

We haven't had it confirmed yet that Yennefer is not going to be able to regrow lost organs - indeed, we don't even know that's what she wants yet - but you can tell that this is not a trustworthy source and so his promise that if she keeps paying him it'll work before long is suspect. Does Yennefer know this? Harder to say - if Triss is anything to go by, mages are just terrible judges of people. But Yennefer is also not just desperate to regrow her organs, she's desperate for a goal. We saw her without one in the fourth episode. She needs something to work toward. I think that makes her willing to try things even if she's aware it probably won't work, because she'd rather chase increasingly unlikely things than have no idea what to do next.

We also see Yennefer is significantly more aggressive in conversation than before and she escalates rapidly. "I've never been shy a day in my life. Count it again." ... "Then your customers will be awfully disappointed when they find a charred spot where you once stood." She's not exactly picking a fight, because she's not initiating, but she's extremely reactive. She's going to keep this trait across the second half of the show.

Is this new? By all appearances. We don't see it last episode. Yennefer is depressed at the time, so her behavior then likely wasn't entirely normal, but she managed to say vague and polite non-answers when Kalis first tried to talk to her that sure sound like she had company manners and no problem keeping to them. It doesn't seem like this is normal behavior for a court mage either (Triss is clearly not able to talk like this, and while she's just one example, Geralt doesn't seem to think the problem is her being unusually doormaty for a mage, and what Tissaia says court mage life is like suggests you have to be good at taking abuse, not giving it) so it seems Yennefer likely couldn't have been acting like this at court. However, it's not that far off from what we see from her in the third episode where when things start going wrong, she lays into first Tissaia and then Istredd, so it's not entirely new either.