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out of the water prophesying? Who knows what this one might have told us." Viviane suddenly burst in with a bubbly song:
    Â 
"
The warrrrrrrrrrters are cold,

But crystal clearrrrrrrr;

I rrrrrrrise to the fly

And so appearrrrrrr
..."
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    "You appear to be interrupting the story," Ambrosius said, and they all laughed.
    "Hobby, take these plates to the stream and rinse them. This old man needs to be taught his manners," Viviane said.
    Hobby took the plates and went down to the stream. With his hands in the cold water, he began to dream. It was a dream in which he was a child again, with a mother and father rocking him to sleep, the
creak-creak-creak
of the cradle sounding suspiciously like the wheels of the green castle cart.
    When he woke, his hands were like ice, and an almost full moon was reflected in silver shards in the water.
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    Theirs was not the only wagon on the road before dawn, but it was the gaudiest by far. Peddlers' children leaped off their own wagons to run alongside, begging the magician for a trick. He did one for each child and asked for no coins at all, even though Viviane scolded about it.
    "Each child will bring another to us," he said, "once we are in the town. They will be our best criers. And those who come in Carmarthen will not get away free." He made a showy pink musk mallow appear from under the chin of a dirt-faced tinker girl, this trick even more remarkable—thought Hobby—because musk mallow was long past season. The girl giggled, took the flower, and ran off.
    Viviane shook her head. It was clearly an old argument between them.
    At first each trick made Hobby gasp with delight. At twelve he was still child enough to be guiled. But partway through the day he began to notice where the flowers and scarves and eggs really appeared from—out of the vast sleeves of the mage's robe. He started watching Ambrosius' hands carefully through slotted eyes and, unconsciously, began to imitate him.
    Viviane reached over and slapped his fingers so hard they burned. "Here!" she said sharply. "It is bad enough he does tricks for free on the road, but you would beggar us for sure if you give his secrets away."
    So, Hobby thought,
there are secrets of the hand as well as the tongue. Sotto voce, indeed.
He was both embarrassed and elated by Viviane's attention, and by his discovery. And, to be truthful, a bit upset that the mage's magic had less to do with some real power and more to do with imagination. Still, his quiet concentration on the mage's tricks and the constant rocking of the wagon soon combined to put him to sleep. Again he dreamed. It was a wicked, nasty dream in which Viviane was as young as he and a whitethorn tree fell upon her. When he awoke, he was suddenly afraid that the dream would come true. He wanted to warn her, but then remembered that his dreams did not seem to come true literally, but only
on the slant.
It would do no good to tell her if he did not understand the dream. That thought lent him a small amount of comfort.
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    If Gwethern had been a bustling little market town, Carmarthen had to be the very center of the commercial world. As they neared it, Hobby saw gardens and orchards laid out in careful squares outside the towering city walls. Some of the trees along the northern edges were ruined, the ground around them raw and wounded. There were spotty pastures where sheep and kine grazed on the fall stubble. The city walls were made up of large blocks of limestone, though who could have moved such giant stones was a mystery to him. Above the walls he glimpsed crenellated towers from which red and white banners waved gaudily in the shifting winds.
    Unable to contain himself any longer, Hobby scrambled through the door of the wagon and squeezed in between Ambrosius and Viviane.
    "Look!" he cried.
    Viviane smiled at the childish outburst, but Ambrosius shook his head. "Not enough just to look, my boy," he said. "You must use all your senses here if we are to