Free Merlin by Jane Yolen

1. FLIGHT
    PURSUED BY DREAMS, THE BOY FLED FROM the town. They were not his dreams; they were the town's dreams, rough and hot and angry and full of blood.
    He squirmed through a bolt-hole in the stone walls, a hole big enough for a badger or fox. Though twelve years old, he was a small boy and he just managed to fit. Sliding down the grassy embankment, he kept an eye out for the green wagon in which his family—or at least all the family he could claim—had left the town hours earlier.
    But as it was night, he somehow got on the wrong path, and he did not come upon any sign of them. Not the wagon which—even in the dark—would have been unmistakable as it was painted and shaped to look like a castle on wheels. Nor the man who claimed to be his father but was not. Nor the woman who made no such claims. Nor the mules who pulled, nor the horse and cow.
    He was on his own. He was alone.
    Everything,
he thought wildly,
everything conspires to keep me on my lone.
By this he meant he could not go back into the town because of the dreams and because the lord of the town, Duke Vortigern, had told him to go. And because the Duke's own spy, a man named Fowler, hated him and would make him a prisoner if he could. And Fowler's even fouler dog knew his scent and would savage him on command.
    And by this the boy also meant that the man in the wagon, Ambrosius, feared the boy's powers, and his woman agreed. They had run not from the Duke's anger but from their own fear.
    "I shall have to go into the woods," the boy told himself.
    The woods did not frighten him. The entire year he was eight, he had lived abandoned in the forest by himself. He had lived as a wild boy, a
wodewose,
without clothing, without warm food, or bedding, or the comfort of story or song. Without words. Without memory. But he had survived it till tamed by Master Robin, a falconer, and in Master Robin's house given a name and a history.
    Surely,
he thought,
I can do at twelve what I did at eight.
    But it was the middle of the night, and a forest—even one you know—can be a fearsome place. So he picked out a tree not too deep into the woods, an oak with a tall, ragged crown which he could just make out against the starry sky. It was a sturdy tree, its trunk wider than he could comfortably span with his arms, with a ridged bark that made it easy to climb.
    He settled into the V-shaped crotch of the tree, some ten feet off the ground, certain he would be safe there from fox and wolf. Then, pulling his knees up to his chest, he slept.
    And dreamed.
    He dreamed about a bear in the forest. A bear with a gold coronet on its head. A bear that walked upright, like a man.
    A bear!
    In his dream he crossed his fingers, an old trick of his that forced him to wake. Shivering in the dark, he drew his legs up even closer. He had found over the years that his dreams had an uncanny way of coming true, but on the slant. A bear—even slantwise—was a danger. It had teeth and claws. It could climb a tree.
    But the bear in his dream had not seemed particularly menacing. It had not even been more than a cub. Besides, the dream was an old one he had had before, and he had yet to see a bear when he was awake, except for one old ratty creature leashed to a traveler that danced to the sad pipings of a flute at the fair. So settling deeper into the curve of the trunk, he slept again.
    This time he did not dream.
    Â 
    Birdsong woke him, a blend of thrush and willow tit and the harsh
kraah kraah
of the hoodie crow. His legs were cramped, his shoulders aching, but he was alive. And it was day.
    He put his head back and sang:
In the woods, in the woods
,
My dear-i-o,

Where the hirds, the hirds sing

Cheer-i-o
...
    Â 
    It was all he could remember of a song that Viviane, the woman in the green wagon, had sung once. But even so it gave him heart. He jumped down from the tree, found a stream, and washed his hands and face in the cold water. It was a habit left over