Chapter 6: Every Picture Tells...

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Some time during the early hours, woken by the wailing siren of a passing ambulance, Fee made her way to her own room. Bleary-eyed, and not entirely convinced she wasn't dreaming, she eased herself off the bed, taking care not to wake her snoring father, and after gently covering him with a quilt she tiptoed across the floor and through the connecting door. Beyond it, her own room was much smaller, but just as warm and neat, and in its centre was a bed which sank beneath her like a giant marshmallow as she lay down. Within moments she was asleep again.

She woke to find brilliant sunlight streaming through the window, but even though she knew she had a million things to do - chief among them her long-awaited shopping trip to the Orange Lane market - she couldn't bring herself to move, at least not yet. Instead she just lay there, smiling lazy, yawny smiles as she stretched like a cat, savouring the decadent feel of the wonderfully crisp and clean sheets wrapped around her. The bed was only a standard hotel double, nothing special at all, but after days of being cocooned inside her warm but frankly musty-smelling sleeping bag it felt like the most luxurious, most glamourous four poster in the world, and closing her eyes she could imagine she was a faerie princess, waking in the bedchamber of a beautiful mountain castle, with her maid and servants just the tug of a bell cord away...

But eventually she began to feel restless, impatient to get on with her day, so after enjoying a final, long, luxurious stretch she flapped the covers back and swung her feet down onto the floor. Sitting there, yawning still, she ran her fingers through her hair and grimaced in disgust when she felt how matted and knotted it was. That made her first decision an easy one.

She sneaked back into her father's room, retrieved her sandalwood soap bar from the bag with all the skill of a cat burglar, then stepped into the shower cubicle, letting out a long sigh of pleasure as the water hit her. She stood as still as a statue, savouring the feel of the water, the scent of the soap and the feel of being clean again. Shower... breakfast...shopping... oh, it was going to be a good day!

An hour later, washed, fed, and dressed in her last remaining clean outfit - denim shorts, big trainers and loose Chinese-dragon t-shirt - she was in the back of a taxi with her father, en-route to the museum where they were to register their Nullarbor discoveries with the Australian Government, their last task to complete before catching a plane home. As the taxi threaded its way through the streets of Adelaide, Fee stared out the open window, impressed by the beauty of the city.

Her guide book had claimed that Adelaide was "a beautiful city, gracious and understated," and as she gazed out the open window, enjoying the flowery scent of the warm air, Fee had to agree. With the mountains of the Lofty Ranges providing an impressive backdrop, Adelaide's wide-streets combined with countless pretty, tree-bordered squares and picturesque boulevards to give it a satisfyingly familiar Mediterranean feel. The buildings themselves, many decorated with colourful hanging baskets, were tall and noble, elegant and bright in the morning Sun. Yes, she thought, smiling at the sight of a gaggle of girls, arms linked, crowding around a bewildered-looking policeman, Adelaide was beautiful. She felt comfortable there.

But Scotland was calling her home louder than ever now, and the only scents she really wanted to taste were wet heather and smoking peat.

Soon, she promised herself, watching an airliner cutting through the sky above, leaving a white cotton vapour trail, soon...

"Here we go, the Market," their taxi driver announced brightly, pulling the taxi over so sharply that Fee lurched sideways against the door. Straightening up, she looked outside and saw a steady stream of people were making their way towards the entrance to the market. The low building formed the corner of two streets, with parasol-shaded sidewalk tables and chairs set out down one side, and blank brick wall down the other. At first glance it looked more like a dockside warehouse than a market.

But then Fee saw the market's sign and smiled. Like everything else she'd seen in Adelaide so far it was strikingly original - a bright orange board with "Orange Lane Market" written on in bold, black letters beneath a stylised painting of a woman's face. The woman was smiling broadly, and her teeth were so white Fee wondered if they'd been an attempt by the artist to draw attention away from her wild hair. He or she had obviously been trying to make the woman's hair look like sunbeams, but painted in blues and greys they looked more like snakes.

"Should have been called Gorgon's Market..." Fee mused, watching a couple of teenagers go into the market through its main entrance, further down the street.

Torn now between excitement and concern, she looked around at her father uncertainly.

"Go ahead, I told you it was okay," he sighed, patting her knee in what he clearly hoped was a reassuring gesture. It didn't work.

"I know.... but it doesn't seem fair leaving you to take care of it all on your own," she argued.

He laughed at that, shaking his head. "You're just worried I'll make a mess of things!" he said accusingly. She shook her head defensively, but blushed too, wondering, not for the first time, when he had developed mind-reading skills. "I'm not completely useless you know!" he continued, in his best wounded voice, "I can see to things at the Museum on my own... and anyway, Ben does this kind of thing all the time. What can go wrong?" She rolled her eyes at that. "Okay, better to not answer that," he admitted, "but go, have fun," he insisted, nodding towards the door, "get out of here!"

"Well... okay..." she sighed, opening the door. Deep down she knew he would be fine, but she still worried that he was a little *too* generous sometimes for how own - their own - good. They weren't a charity. Shuddering slightly she pushed those thoughts away, they were too close to the accusations her mother had fired at him back when -

No, no time for that.

"I'll see you later, I've got the museum address." Giving him a peck on the cheek she swung the door open and climbed out. Outside the confines of the air-conditioned taxi the Adelaide air was hot and dry, with the faintest hint of a breeze blowing down from the Range, carrying with it the clean scent of eucalyptus.

But she had a different scent in her nostrils now, the scent of  bargains, odds and ends and trinkets, so she turned away from the taxi, swinging the door shut behind her, and started to walk towards the market entrance, focused. But then she heard her father call out her name, and looked back over her shoulder to see him leaning out the window, a hand extended toward her.

Re-tracing her steps back to the car she saw he was holding out several bank notes. "No, I can't," she said, "I have money, dad, I'm okay - "

"C'mon, take it," he insisted, pushing it towards her.

She refused to look at it. "Dad, we're supposed to be here to earn money, not spend it!" she sighed, starting to feel angry with him. Sometimes he was just so -

 "Fee... please..." he began, a hint of desperation creeping into his voice, and she backed off from her anger, sensing he needed to get something off his chest. "You put up with so much...with me..." he said, a trace of guilt replacing the edge of desperation. "I just want you to - " he began, then shook his head, as if trying to dislodge cobwebs from inside. It was all coming out wrong, she realized. This was something he'd rehearsed saying and he was making a mess of it. She knew how that felt.

"Fee," he began again, more quietly, "you make so many sacrifices for this - for us - I want you to get something for yourself, something just for you. Okay?" She said nothing. Didn't know what *to* say. "Please? I saved this out of my *own* pocket money..."

She couldn't help but laugh at that and looking into his eyes she knew this was one argument she could never win; they were shining, his love for her glowing within them for all to see. "Thank you," she smiled, conceding defeat graciously. She took the notes, saw there were five: twenty five dollars, more than enough to buy what she was hoping to find, *if* the Universe was feeling generous today. "You're an idiot, but I love you," she said, kissing his cheek again, adding "see you later," then she had to turn away so he couldn't see the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.

When she finally looked around again the taxi was disappearing from view around a corner, her father's hand waving back at her happily thru the open window. Then, with a worrying screech of tires, he was gone, and she was on her own. At last.

Taking a last, deep breath of the warm, scented air she stuffed the bank notes down into the pocket of her shorts and headed inside.

She followed the crowd down the street and into the market, enjoying the sing-song cacophony of human voices again after so long in the deathly-quiet of the desert, and eventually emerged into a cavern-like hall, where she stood transfixed, like a rabbit - or a kangaroo! - caught in a car's headlights.

Orange Lane Market was every bit as much of a wonderland of oddities and curios as she had dared hope. Refreshingly cool, the hall was an Aladdin's Cave of what her father called "Fee Treasure". Beneath a barn-like ceiling of wooden beams decorated with colourful flags, banners and pennants, stalls stretched away in every direction. Some were simple stands, plain wood trestle tables or similar, while others resembled small medieval marquees, with metal frames supporting elaborately-decorated canopies and wraparound curtains of brightly-coloured cloth. But each stall, big or small, plain or grand, covered or supported a mini dragon's horde of "stuff". She smiled to herself, enjoying the final moments of anticipation. A moment's pause for a last visual sweep of the room, then she dived in.

Very soon she was lost in the wonder of the place. It was as if someone had peeked into her brain and created a "Fee's Idea Of Heaven" virtual reality program out of what they had found in there. She found stalls selling sculptures of angels and demons; candles shaped like noble unicorns or roaring dragons; paintings of mountain-top castles silhouetted against impossibly beautiful cloudscapes and sunsets; jewelry shaped like spiral galaxies or bizarre symbols from a hundred different countries and cultures, and more. She had to force herself to stop smiling when she noticed people looking at her strangely. But she couldn't help it, she was in Wonderland!

Ten minutes after beginning her sweep she found It, the stall she had been hoping for. Sandwiched in-between others offering "Oriental Poetry" and "Astrology Candles" it had a bewildering variety of rocks and minerals displayed on crudely-constructed shelves and stands, and leaning over them Fee found everything from polished slices of agate to ugly chunks of amber, dull orange nuggets embedded with prehistoric insects, bugs and pollen grains.

And there, near the back, almost hidden behind a box piled high with nuggets of "Fools Gold", was a box of unremarkable-looking rocks labeled simply "Odds and Ends".

Fee smiled, eyes flashing. Bingo.

After making a show of looking at some of the stall's more exotic lines, Fee reached for the box casually and pulled it to the front where she could rummage through it, putting on her best, unexcited "just looking" face. It worked; the young couple beside her paid her no attention as she went through the box's contents, examining them one by one, quietly but efficiently checking their weight and shape and contours as she turned them over in her steady hands. One after another proved to be, as advertised, just an "odd" or an "end", just pieces of unusually-shaped or coloured granite, quartz or whatever, and she laid them all down on the table top without comment or change of expression. She knew she was good at this -

Aaahhhh....

The rock was as big as a large plum, and it felt... wrong. It was too heavy for its size for one thing, just a little darker than it had a right to be too, but instead of being a glossy black it was a dull, matte black, the colour of cold ash, and indeed it looked like a burnt-out charcoal briquette plucked from a dead barbecue. The little cracks and hairline fractures running across its smooth surface looked out of place on something which felt so solid and bulky.

She turned it over in her hand, slowly. You're no 'rock', you can't fool me, she accused it telepathically.

She let out a long, slow breath then, telling herself to stay in control, not give anything away, even though she was hearing alarm bells clanging inside her head. She knew she couldn't afford to appear too eager or too excited by the 'rock'; the stall owner would pick up on it and wonder why, Maybe even hear alarm bells of his own. So she just put the 'rock' to one side without fuss or comment, and continued to grope through the now half-emptied box, continuing her search. But her brain was whirling. She needed a Cover -

And there it was, hiding down at the bottom - another rock, a real rock this time, which looked quite - but not very - similar to the 'rock' she had placed at the side. Well, you're not perfect, she thought, picking it up, noting how it felt much lighter and was devoid of cracks on its skin, but you'll have to do...

Deep breath. Here goes...

"How much for these?" she asked the stallowner, holding both the rock and the 'rock' in her hands.

The man eyed her curiously, one eyebrow raised, Vulcan-style, and Fee's breath caught in her throat. Did he suspect she knew something about the 'rock' he didn't? Or, worse, was it a plant, a trap designed to fool and humiliate people like her? Had it claimed other victims, purely for his own sadistic amusement? But no, she couldn't allow herself to think that way, it was no good second-guessing. She had to just go with her feelings. He didn't Know, he didn't.

For that matter, she didn't Know either, not totally at least. All she had were suspicions, feelings, no proof beyond her first impressions. But she knew she had to go with her gut instinct. If she was wrong she'd be out of pocket by a few dollars. But if she was right -

"They're ugly, I know," she said to the stall-owner in an exagerated Scottish accent, sensing his eyes upon her as she clicked the two objects together, "but they'll look great on my desk back at Uni..." she added with a gentle, embarrassed laugh.

That seemed to satisfy him he was dealing with an everyday punter, and he looked down at the box, glancing at something written on its back, she assumed. "Seven dollars," he declared,

"each."

Fee knew he'd made the price up on the spot, right before her eyes. The label on the back of the box probably said something like two or three dollars each, certainly not seven.

So... this was the Moment, the crunch time. She would either fly here or crash and burn, there was no middle ground, no compromise. It was a ludicrous price for a pair of rocks, fourteen dollars, and she could tell he suspected she knew that too. But her own suspicions were just that, suspicions, she wasn't sure, about him, about *anything*, and that left her with two options.

There were risks with both. If she meekly agreed to pay up without protest he might figure out she wanted the rocks at any price, and, suspecting an expert trying to put one over on him, suddenly decide they weren't for sale. On the other hand, if she haggled he might suspect nothing but withdraw them from sale anyway, just because he could, just because he'd enjoy seeing a young woman frustrated and disappointed. She'd met that kind many times.

It was a minefield she'd been in twice before. So far the score was Fee 1, Trader 1. Time to creep ahead.

"Fourteen dollars..." she sighed heavily, "that seems a lot for a couple of paperweights..." She let her disapproval and doubt hang in the air between them, all the while watching his face, but it gave nothing away. Either he was unaware of what he had,or he was as Good At This as she was.

"I don't think I have that much anyway..." she said matter-of-factly, reaching for the notes crumpled up in her pocket. She offered him a weak, pleading smile to divert his attention away from her hand while she carefully and quietly counted out two of the notes in her pocket, then pulled them out, flattening them slowly to make sure he got a good look at the hard currency. "No, I only have ten dollars," she sighed, casting a wistful glance at the two rocks she'd laid on the  table top. A moment's pause, as if she was arguing with her inner voices, then she shook her head. "No," she said decisively, "thanks, but I think I'll leave it," she concluded, and started to pack the rocks away again.

She held her breath as she placed the rocks back in the box, and prepared to walk away. Time seemed to stand still, and she began to wonder if she'd made a dreadful mistake and misread the signs, but eventually, sensing a lost sale, the stall-owner reached out to snatch the two five dollar bills from her hand.

"Ten will do, I suppose," he growled grudgingly, "but I have no bags..."

Fee looked him straight in the eye as she picked up both rocks and stuffed them into her other pocket. "Oh, that's okay," she beamed, masking her true, inner "ha ha! Gotcha!" expression with a look of relief, "thank you!" With a last beaming smile she turned on her heel and headed down the line of stalls, out of his line of sight, taking care not top appear in too much of a rush to escape. Behind her the stall-owner tucked the notes into his breast pocket with a wry smile, congratulating himself for fleecing the cheating the innocent young thing. Ten dollars for two three-dollar chunks of desert rock, he chuckled to himself, there really was one born every minute.

Thirty feet away, leaning against a wall in the concealing shadow of a different stall, Fee touched her pocket magnet against the meteorite. It didn't stick. Doubt trembled through her. Had she been wrong? No, she knew she wasn't. The rock was... different, she could feel it, in her gut. There was just something about it. Go with your instincts, her mother had told her, once, a lifetime ago. And her instincts were screaming at her now. That was good enough for Fee.

Pulling a handkerchief out of her rear pocket, Fee wrapped it around the meteorite and pushed it down into the pocket on her left hip, hiding it away. No sense tempting fate, she knew. She also knew that she should probably leave straight away; surely she'd had her quota of luck for the day, and looking for anything else would be just plain greedy, or stupid, or both. But there was so much more to see, so many wonders left to stumble across among the jumble of stalls and stands she couldn't bring herself to leave, not yet...

She glanced at her watch. 1.30, she'd been there just under an hour. Hardly any time at all, really. Another hour and then she'd leave, she decided. Dropping the real rock into a nearby rubbish bin she resumed her hunt, emerging from the cover of the shadows and joining the river of people flowing clockwise around the market.

Two complete circuits of the market later she had almost completed her hunt, so she stepped back out of the tide of bargain hunters to rest against a wall. Looking into her bags she was fairly pleased with her haul: half a dozen tiny bottles of aromatherapy oil; a handful of scented candles (including two sandalwood, which she couldn't wait to light up!); several battered sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks she'd been looking for for years, and a small metal-cast figure of a unicorn rearing up on its hind legs, mane blowing in the wind and spiral horn pointing skywards. No, not a bad haul at all!

But most important of all, even more important to her than the meteorite, was the carefully-wrapped wafer-thin slice of agate she'd found on yet another mineral stall. She'd fallen in love with it the first moment she saw it, and when the dealer held it up to the light, letting her see how the transparent concentric bands of green, orange, blue and red shone when lit from behind she had reached into her pocket for the ten dollars so quickly there had almost been a sonic boom. All she had to do was keep it hidden from her father until they got back to Edinburgh, then she could sneak it onto his desk and surprise him with his gift. He'd complain of course, tell her off for wasting her money on him, but it would be worth it to see the look on his face -

From somewhere down the bottom of the hall she heard three low clangs, which echoed across the whole of the market. Horrified she looked at her watch - 3.00pm! So much for "one more hour"! Wrapping the handles of her bags tightly around her hand she set off for the exit, mentally plotting out her route across town to the Museum, where her father was no doubt wondering - and worrying - what had happened to her.

As much as Fee loved markets, she hated most of the people she had to share them with, and entered each hall with the trepidation and heightened sense of awareness of a soldier going into battle. Actually, that was how she looked upon her fellow bargain hunters, as enemies, and she viewed each shopping trip as a mission into enemyheld territory. But instead of dodging landmines, machine guns and falling bombs she had to avoid deathtrap pushchairs, bawling children and tripwire dog leads.

At first it had frustrated her, but she had gradually got used to it, and had even developed a kind of Zen-like calm acceptance of the situation; it was just the price she had to pay. All she had to do was walk slowly and steadily around the stalls, carefully avoiding feet, baby buggies and kids, and she'd survive. But today, in her haste to get to the exit she forgot herself and became one of The Enemy herself. She pushed and elbowed her way through the crowd, muttering insincere apologies and ignoring protests.

Inevitably, she eventually came up against someone who wouldn't move.

Caught off balance, she literally bounced off the man and span away to one side to crash against the side of a large, tented stall. As she lay there watching the stall wobble above and around her as if made of jelly a crowd gathered to stare at her, waiting for the canopy to fall and cover her like a collapsed Big Top...

But thankfully the framework held, and as the crowd of gawpers lost interest and started to drift away she looked up to see the stall's owner, a woman of around seventy, dressed in patched jeans and an outsize, garishly tie-dyed shirt. The shirt screamed "hippy", but with her deep, deep tan, wrinkled-parchment skin and wild mane of silver hair she looked more like an elder from a North American Indian tribe. The old woman said nothing, just extended her hand. It was as tanned  and wrinkled as her face, if not more so.

"I'm sorry," Fee stammered, taking the old woman's hand. She was hauled back on to her feet in moments; the woman was far stronger than she looked. "Your stall - "

" - will be fine," the woman assured her, "you, however, appear to be in need of repair," she added, glancing up at Fee's fringe.

Puzzled, Fee raised her other hand to her forehead, felt a warm wetness there, and found her fingers smeared with blood when she examined them. "Oh... um, yes, I am," she said disbelievingly. The old woman, still holding her other hand, led her around the back of the stall, led her inside and sat her down on a stool. Before Fee could protest the woman was dabbing at the cut with a tissue. It stung, a little, but Fee had endured worse. A lot worse.

Looking around her as the old woman tended to her cut in silence, Fee saw she was surrounded by pictures - paintings, photos, etchings, prints, every form and format of illustration she could think of. They were everywhere: hanging from the frame's criss-crossing struts and beams, leaning up against the walls, standing one on top of another in stacks on the front table, just everywhere. Beneath the table several large boxes were crammed full of yet more. She made a quick mental guestimate: several hundred pictures in the tent, at least. It was a wonder the tent didn't collapse under their weight.

"Thank you," she said, as the old woman tossed the bloodied tissue away and resumed her work with a second, clean one, "but I don't want to be any trouble - "

" - then you'll hold still," she was told, quietly but forcefully. "The blood has almost stopped flowing now. A few moments more, that is all..."

Fee looked up at the woman. She radiated wisdom and patience, knowledge and understanding. "Thank you," she said again, and relaxed. Then she remembered her bags. All her things! Where were they? Where had they gone?

But the old woman was ahead of her yet again, and glanced towards the back of the tented stall. Following her gaze Fee saw her bags leaning against each other, just a few feet away. Relief flooded over her; her things - more importantly, her father's present - were safe. She could relax. Again.

"If you'll just wait here a while," the old woman said, the tone of her voice making it perfectly clear it was an order and not a suggestion, "I'll get you some coffee." Then she was gone, leaving Fee alone in the tent. With the pictures.

With time to properly check out the paintings and photographs mounted on the tent walls and frame now, Fee saw that they were all of the same thing - castles. They were different shapes, styles and designs, had different foregrounds and backgrounds, but were all a familiar combination of turrets, towers and tall walls.

Nice enough, she conceded, but not her kind of thing. She preferred her dragons and unicorns.

Then she noticed, just above a plastic food container which doubled as a money chest, a single, small picture, deliberately separated from the rest for some reason. Out of sight from the front of the stall, too. Very curious.

Intrigued by its isolation she walked over to it for a better look.

Up close it proved to be much darker than the rest, more stylized too, like a cartoon, and she realized she was looking at a print of a medieval engraving of some kind, probably taken off a woodcut. And it was *very* old, she was certain of that. The castle depicted on the picture was much older than the others around it, far smaller too, really little more than a lone stone tower silhouetted against a cloud-painted sky. The whole thing reminded her of a Lowry painting she'd seen once, a depressing portrait of a dark, gloomy factory, its chimneys belching dirt and filth into an already dirty, filthy sky. Depressing, bleak. The artist had bravely tried to add a little beauty to the picture by showing a crescent moon just above and to the right of the tower, but it looked out of place on a daytime scene, and all it did was highlight the cold emptiness of the landscape.

Fee stared at the print, wondering what life might have been like in such an isolated, desperate place. A maiden might have been imprisoned in such a castle, or worse. It had known no princesses, or luxurious four poster beds, that was for sure.

Then she noticed something odd about the print. Like a lot of the other pictures scattered around, it had human figures on it, shabbily-dressed serfs and peasants clustered around the crumbling castle's base. But looking more closely Fee noticed a difference: in all the other pictures the figures were shown at work, either ploughing the barren ground or sowing it with seed... yet on the picture in front of her the men and women were all staring at the sky, eyes wide in alarm, arms raised, as if petrified by some terrible, ghastly apparition...

But the thing filling them with so much terror was no apparition. Hanging in the sky above the castle, bursting through the clouds to leer down at them, was a familiar beast, a huge creature with monstrous wings and cruel, outstretched talons. A dragon. And it was breathing fireballs -

- no, not fireballs, Fee realised, leaning closer to the print. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end: the dragon was spitting flaming *stones* down at the terrified peasants..!

Suddenly the picture *was* her kind of thing...

"You like my pictures?" she heard a deep voice ask, and turned to see the old woman entering the tent, a steaming cup of coffee clutched in one hand.

"Yes, I do..." Fee stammered, caught by surprise, "they're all very interesting - "

"That one more than the others, perhaps..?" the woman enquired, eyes flashing. Fee wasn't sure how much to say. The picture was tantalizingly, hypnotizing familiar; it reminded her of the classic Tubingen woodcut which portrayed the fall of the Ensisheim meteorite in 1492. Her brain was whirling now. Did this little print, tucked away in a side-stall in an Adelaide market, show a similar meteorite fall..? No, it couldn't. Could it?

"Very old picture," the woman said solemnly, "one of my favourites, not for sale."

Fee held back a laugh. If the old woman had been looking for a sign of disappointment, she was out of luck. Its lack of availability wasn't really an issue when she had just a few dollars left.

"Never mind," Fee said as she gratefully took the offered cup of coffee, figuring she had to make an effort to react in some way, "it is interesting though..." She sipped at the coffee, but kept her eyes on the picture, mental cogs turning. She knew there was something about it, she could feel it, just as she could feel that she had been steered to the stall in some way. Another of the Universe's little nudges, telling her it had a job for her to do, no doubt.

Fee took another sip of coffee, trying to think of a plan. She knew she couldn't just walk away from this, whatever "this" was. Eventually she decided she had nothing to lose by being direct.

"Have you any idea where that castle is..?" she asked, trying to sound casual.

The old woman's eyes danced with amusement. "Aaah, brave highlander hunt dragons..?" she laughed.

"N-no," Fee said quickly - too quickly; the old woman's eyes narrowed, deadly serious again.

"Dangerous to hunt dragons," she warned, wagging a finger at Fee like she was telling off a naughty child. "Dragons hide, not want to be found, not even by highlander - perhaps especially not by highlander." She paused then, and when she spoke again Fee got the distinct impression she was being warned off. Personally.

"Dragons protect their young," the old woman said, her words edged with steel.

"Protect their... what?" Fee asked, puzzled. The old woman wasn't talking sense. But the woman didn't reply; she obviously thought she had already said enough. Or, perhaps, too much.

"Now, I am glad you have recovered, but I have work to do," the woman announced brightly, walking towards the tent flap, her meaning clear.

Fee nodded and got to her feet, laying the half empty coffee cup on a nearby tabletop. "Thank you for your kindness," she said, picking up her carrier bags, "it was very good of you. I feel much better now."

The old woman nodded in acknowledgement and held open the flap to let Fee pass through. "You are welcome," she said, "go now, and take care... but remember," she added darkly, blocking Fee's path with an outstretched arm, "some treasures are not meant to be found."

Fee smiled sweetly. "I'll remember," she said, "and thanks again..." ... you nutcase, she added silently, ducking under the arm and out of the tent. But she didn't believe that herself, not for a minute. The old woman knew something, something about the print, something about the castle and the fire-stone spitting dragon.

Something she wasn't going to share.

Oh well, Fee thought as she headed for the market hall exit, stepping lightly now, filled with determination and a new sense of purpose, I'll just have to find out on my own...