“We have our ways,” she said. If she was trying to be awe-inspiring, she was having no more success than I. “Now let me see!” She walked around me slowly, examined the front and back of my head, squeezed my arm above the elbow, plucked out a hair and held it up to the light, and finally stared at my shoes.

“Yes,” she said at last, and this time without a smile. “I can see your future. Shortly you will meet someone beautiful and mysterious, and you will fall deeply in love.”

This was so stereotypically what Romney women told young men at the fairs-and not even for free! — that I had to laugh. “Don’t you have any other fortunes? You know wizards never marry.”

“Love and marriage are two different things,” she said as though the platitude had great significance. “Now, if you will excuse me, sir.”

She returned to the caravans where the children had been watching us impatiently, and I continued toward the city gates. Although I was not particularly concerned about meeting someone beautiful and mysterious, I did wonder who had given the children a demonstration of magic. It is far harder to make something invisible than to make an illusion appear, and to be able to surround oneself in real fire without being burned takes powerful magic indeed.

Inside the gates, I threaded my way through the narrow streets to the little plaza in front of the cathedral. The last time I had been here it had been full of the carts and stalls of farmers, merchants, and food sellers. Now it was a construction site, jammed with lumber, heaps of cut stone, workmen’s huts, the vats where mortar was mixed, and the wooden forms used to lay out the stonework patterns on the ground before they were hoisted up. A huge windlass was being erected, its treadmill big enough for three men.