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day several times and now it was even more noticeable in the light of the fire. He fingered it now, turning it in his fingers. When the others lay down to sleep he sat there, turning it, turning it, at last laying it upon his tongue and sucking upon it as a baby does a sugar tit.
    I knew what it was then. I’d never seen one before that I knew of, though there was talk of them in the Demesne, as there is always talk of things exotic and strange. It was a dream crystal. If what I had heard about them was true, it was no wonder he could not deal with the reality around him. He had already dreamed this occasion, dreamed its progress and conclusion. Nothing I could say would disrupt the dream. Too much confusion between the dream and the reality would unbalance him completely, and who knew what he might do then.
    I waited, scarcely breathing until he let the thing fall from his mouth and wandered toward the tent. The tent the men slept in was out of reach of my tether, so I couldn’t sneak in on them in the night. I could get up very, very early, however, and start my wander once more. It took until noon to find a plant of shivery-green. Only one plant of it, trembling like a little emerald fountain between the buttress roots of a great tree, with three little seed clusters nodding at the tips of the stems. So. Now the location of it was known, if one could only figure out what to do about it.
    I began to be ubiquitous around the fire. When and if the rainhat roots and the shivery-green seeds were put together, the juice would have to get into their food somehow. Once they were asleep for some little time, the tether could be pounded on a rock until it frayed through. Then I could get a knife off one of them and cut the harness. King Kelver’s gift was in my pocket, the scent bottle in the shape of a frog. That would hold a lot more of the juices than was needed.
    Invisible. I began bashing up some bark into strips to make a basket. Right away Porvius sent one of the men over to see what was going on, and I ignored him while threading webwillow twigs and bark pieces together. It wouldn’t have fooled a dam for a minute. Any child knows you can’t make basket of webwillow bark, for it breaks as it dries. Wet, however, it looked all right, and he went mumbling back to the fire, while I went on bashing, interrupting it from time to time to wander about and dig roots. In the late afternoon when it began to get dark, I picked the shivery-green seeds and bashed them up with the rainhat root on the same hollow rock I’d been bashing things on all day. A piece of rainhat leaf made a spoon and a funnel, all in one, and the juice went in the scent bottle, which had been previously emptied in the thicket. It made the thicket smell better, which by that time it needed.
    Now there was enough juice to put them to sleep for a season, about. Well, for ten days at least, I thought, not realizing how much webwillow pulp and fragments had remained on the rock to adulterate my brew. My own ignorance saved me. An experienced herbalist might not have tried it without better equipment.
    I was just getting ready to go over to the fire once more, this time to put the juice in their stew—I’d have to go without eating anything tonight myself—when there was a hail from the mountain and I looked up to see a Herald in full panoply and two people with blindfolds on. It was Joramal Trandle and Murzy, but not Mendost. Bloster was swearing in a tight, ugly voice.
    Another thing Murzy had told me about invisibility. If you do what you always do when other people are distracted, they simply won’t see you. So I kept right on moving toward the fire, scent bottle in hand, reached for the stew spoon, and took a bite—burning my mouth—then dumped the juice in it as the spoon went back. All the men were watching the Herald. None of them was watching me.
    “Let all in sound of my voice give heed,” cried the Herald. “Mendost of Stoneflight Demesne,