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mountain to island, he found no trace of them, and ended his days a sad and furious man.
    Because what she had done next had been astonishing. It was a use of her power that I would never dare to summon.
    When the act was done, she had settled down to wait for time to pass …
    ‘Did he find his sons?’
    ‘He found one of them,’ I answered. ‘The elder, deep in Greek Land close to an ancient oracle. The young man had taken the name Orgetorix.’
    Ambaros whistled with surprise. ‘ King of killers ? That’s a strong name. Did he live up to it?’
    ‘From what I saw of him, very much so.’
    He nodded his head and smiled. ‘I’m glad. So Jason has one of his boys back.’
    ‘Therein lies a tragedy. Orgetorix had such hate in his heart, put there by his mother, that he rejected Jason, tried to kill him. I watched the whole thing. Jason was shocked and distraught. He accused me of betraying him because I hadn’t told him everything I knew about his son.’
    I still shuddered to think of that look in Jason’s eyes as he hunched, gaping and bloody, the look of contempt for me, the vengeful look; and his words murmured as he fought to stave off death: Dread the dawn when you wake to find me crouching over you. Dread that dawn.
    And he would be following me to Alba, now, because that was where Medea had hidden her younger son, Kinos, nicknamed Little Dreamer.
    When I told Ambaros this, he laughed.
    ‘Well, that will take a lot of searching. This may be what you call an island, but the land is vast. There are not just the Five Kingdoms. A multitude of petty kingdoms lie to the north of us, and as many to the south and to the west, beyond Ghostland. And they are all afflicted with marshes, boglands, forests, mountains, valleys and rockstrewn plains. The Lords Gog and Magog, as tall as trees, could go into hiding and never be found.’
    ‘Little Dreamer will have left a trail,’ I assured Ambaros.
    His look at me was strange, though he was half-smiling.
    ‘I am in awe of you,’ he said later, as we rested for the night in a cove of rocks, sheltered by the overhanging branches of an elm to which we had tied our cloaks as a windbreak. ‘In awe! And yet I feel comfortable with you, not at all afraid of what you can do with just the flick of your finger and thumb. Perhaps it’s because you look younger than my own son.’
    ‘He’s battle-weary. I’m just travel-weary.’
    ‘But where you travel, things begin to happen. It’s as if that guardian of the exiles was waiting for you. How did she know you were here? How did she know when you would pass along the river, past the Ford of the Last Farewell? She tried to follow you at once, but you went into hiding. She’s been searching for you ever since, and finally she found me in the settlement in the gorge, and I brought her to Taurovinda. Just as you’d arrived! Someone is stitching our lives together, I think.’
    I told him about the Three of Awful Boding.
    ‘Strange again: they never appear except to kings and their consorts. Sometimes to a king’s champion.’
    And of the small band of rain-ghostly men who had told me of Ambaros’s presence in the groves.
    ‘Yes, I thought we were being followed. There was a large war band as well, the sort that drove us from the fortress for the second time. Something is stirring up because of you, Merlin. Something that is putting the lives of the exiles in danger.’
    I doubted very much that whatever was occurring across the living flow of Nantosuelta had anything to do with me and told him so.
    Three are returning who are a threat to you. A fourth is already here and hiding.
    There would be answers, but for the moment I felt as much in the dark as he.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Exiles in Ghostland
    I waited at the Ford of the Last Farewell for a full day, with Ambaros and his small retinue of men, acquired as we passed through the camp of the exiles, the exiles, the deep valley where the survivors from Taurovinda had hidden after