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  "I wonder the Duke let them go," Fowler mused aloud. "But perhaps he does not know they are gone yet. Perhaps they greased the palm of some willing gatekeeper. There may be some good to be made from this yet."

  "You mean good for you," Hobby said.

  "That is all anyone ever means, boy," Fowler said. He laughed out loud and at that his dog slapped at the ground with a paw. Neither sound was comforting. "Come, Hawk. I expect the Duke would like to know that you, at least, are safe and awake."

  14. TRUE MAGIC

  THEY WENT UP TO THE DUKE'S PRIVATE APARTments by a twisting back stair. At each turning stood a stone-eyed guard, hand on sword beneath a flickering wall torch. The flames made shadows crawl up and down the stairs. Hobby could not have run, even if he dared, not because of the guards but because Fowler's hand was ever on his shoulder.

  The Duke was waiting for them, sitting at a great desk near a window. He was fingering papers and his eyes were not on them. Hobby could not tell if the man was just tired or if he—like most of the nobles—was unlettered. His eyes, however, were on Hobby and his keeper, and these two he could read very well indeed.

  "You have brought me the singing bird but not his handler," the Duke said. "He is no good to me without his quick-fingered interpreter, that mage."

  Hobby spoke up at once. If Fowler had hoped to get something for his news, he would not. "The mage, Ambrosius, is gone. You will not find him."

  "A father desert his child?" the Duke asked, then gave a short laugh, musing aloud. "The forest teems with such leavings—boys and girls without hope of family or life. Why should your father be different?"

  Hobby looked down at the rushes on the floor. "He is not my father. My father was a falconer." Then he looked up, staring directly into the Duke's eyes. "Ambrosius is no real magic maker either."

  The Duke leaned back in his chair and made a triangle of his fingers. "A charlatan. And you think this news surprises me?" But his face spoke differently.

  Fowler chuckled.

  "Are you a charlatan, too, boy?" the Duke asked.

  "I do not know what I am," Hobby answered truthfully, for his magic required it.

  "Are your dreams trickery then?" The Duke was like a hound on a scent.

  Hobby suddenly remembered Ambrosius' warning against speaking truth to princes. Yet he knew, in his very bones, that he had to answer all direct questions of his magic directly. "My dreams come true. But on the slant."

  "On the slant." The Duke closed his eyes and his voice was old. "I am not a man of such angles," he said. "We have got already what we wanted from the mage. The building stands. What more I seek, I do not rightly know. Can you tell me more, boy?"

  The question was specific and Hobby knew he had no choice but to speak the truth. "There is more, sir."

  "Then tell it me," the Duke said, with a sigh.

  "The dragons are meant to be armies." Hobby spoke quietly but not so quietly that he could not be heard in that hush of a room. "Not your army or your wife's. But greater armies than both. There will be a battle and you will have the worst of it."

  "How much worse?"

  Hobby drew in a breath. He could not stop telling the dream. "You will die. Burned up in flame greater than dragon's breath."

  "What battle, boy?" Fowler asked. "When?" He had drawn close to Hobby's side and breathed the questions into the boy's ear.

  "My dream does not name a time or place of battle," Hobby said.

  "Then, boy," the Duke said, "your dream is useless. I dream every night of battles. Some I win, some I lose. In this world there are always battles. There are always deaths. When you are a duke. When you would be a king." He stood and turned his back on the boy and the spy, staring out through the window to the blackness beyond. "I am not afraid to die cleanly, on the battlefield. But burning..." He shuddered. "I do not believe your slantwise dreaming. It is too tricky for an old soldier. Go away, boy. You tire me." And indeed the Duke's shoulders seemed to sag and his voice was ragged, as if torn on a nail.

  "But perhaps..." Fowler began.

  The Duke turned around abruptly, suddenly years younger in his fury. "But me no buts, Master Mind-It-All. You have brought me no news from the south. No news about my enemies, about the numbers of their armies, about where they march and when. You have brought me only a charlatan, long fled, and a boy who dreams—so he says—my death by burning. Burning! Like a common witch. Like a warlock. I will not hear of it. " He glared at Fowler and not at Hobby. If he had looked at the boy, his story might have ended differently. But he did not. He concentrated all his anger on the man opposite him. "I will not be fooled. I am a fighting man. I do not listen to the dreams of ragged boys. Run along, child, and find your father. If you can."

  Hobby turned to leave and the dog, who had been lying at Fowler's feet, rose and walked stifflegged toward him, the hair on the ridge of its neck rising.

  "I do not believe he is an ordinary boy, my lord," Fowler said. "Neither does my dog. He is more than the son of a falconer or the boy of a wandering player. I believe we need to find out who he is. Test his magic. Then perhaps he will be able to tell us the time and place of battles, the time and place of..."

  "Of my death?" The fury in the Duke's voice was controlled now, tight, and the more dangerous for it. "So you can sell that piece of information to someone else?"

  "My lord, do you so mistrust me?" Fowler asked.

  "You have asked too many wrong questions already and not enough right ones," the Duke said. "I would be a fool not to mistrust you. I am no fool."

  "Just his name, my lord duke," Fowler said. But he asked it of the Duke, not Hobby.

  Hobby hesitated, knowing that names held power. Though he had not been asked directly, and though it was not about a dream, it still touched on his magic. But not—he realized—directly. "I am a hawk," he said, humor hidden in his answer. "A hawk among princes."

  The Duke laughed explosively as if he got the joke. "A hawk. Ah yes, I remember your name now, Hobby. Fly away, little hawk, before I change my mind."

  "Hawk," said Fowler, remembering the other name, and reaching for the boy.

  "Merlin," the boy whispered, but sotto voce, without sound. Then, as the Duke had ordered, he flew back down the stairs and out into the night, where armies were, truly, massing on the far side of the woods.

  He flew unerringly into those woods, and freedom.

  Light.

  Morn.

  "What is that hawk, Viviane? The one circling above us. Is it a hobby?"

  "There is no hawk above us, old man. There is only cloud and, beyond it, sky."

  "I heard the hawk. I heard his voice."

  "It was a dream."

  "I never dream. Only he dreams."

  "You will dream a long dream soon. About the times when your fingers were swift and sure with magic. When you could pluck asters and asphodels from a child's ear."

  "I never could do magic. Not like the boy."

  "Hush. There was no hoy. That was only a dream. Drink this and the dream will come again. For good."

  The bells in her earrings ring like the sound of a tamed hawk's jesses, like the sound of a freed soul as it makes its long and perilous passage between earth and heaven.

  Author's Note

  The story of Merlin, King Arthur's great court wizard, is not one story but many. In some of the tales he is a Druid priest, in others a seer, in still others a shape-shifter, a dream-reader, a wild man in the woods.

  The only story told of Merlin's childhood handed down from the Middle Ages is that he is a fatherless Welsh princeling who has prophetic dreams about red and white dragons. In the story he tells this dream—under threat of execution—to the usurping King Vortigern. He explains that the dream is about Vortigern's battle tower, which has been collapsing. Under the boy's instructions, the tower is made to stand, but it is in that very tower that Vortigern is then burned to death by soldiers loyal to the true king.

  I have borrowed bits and pieces
of that old story, reworking it to include research about traveling players and market day fairs. I have put in Viviane, who in the old tales of Merlin first seduces and then kills the old man after he has taught her all his magic, by casking him up in a tree. (Or putting him to sleep in a cave.) I have also put in Ambrosius, who, in the histories, is sometimes mentioned as the father of Arthur, sometimes as a general who began the fight to unite all Britain, sometimes as Vortigern's rival and the cause of his death. In other words, I have played around with elements of the stories as writers of "Arthuriana" have always done.

  The stories and histories from that time—fifth century through the fifteenth—are like Merlin's dream, always told on the slant. The tales of Merlin are so entwined, truth and fiction, that they are tangled and impenetrable as the forests of old Britain.

  —J. Y.