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bartering centers. Shelby didn’t have much to offer, but she managed to exchange her hot-pink elastic hair band for a lace doily in the shape of a heart, which she planned to give to Luce “from Daniel.”
    She’d also happily swapped a hemp ankle bracelet Phil had given her on some date back at Shoreline for a leather dagger sheath she figured Daniel might like. Guys were hard to shop for.
    The hair band and the anklet were less than worthless to Shelby, but they were exotic to the merchants. “What is this alchemical substance that stretches and retains its shape?” they asked her, examining the band as if it were a priceless gem. Shelby had stifled her laughter, those medieval torture devices never too far from her thoughts.
    Like always after shopping, Shelby was ravenous.She hoped Miles had dug up some good grub. She was hurrying across the crowded green to meet him when a blurry thought came into focus: What was she forgetting?
    “Oh, what a lovely bonnet!” A fair-haired woman with a broad smile appeared before her. She stroked the lace veil of the wimple that Shelby had swiped from the cart that morning. “Is it one of Master Tailor’s?”
    “Uh, who?” Shelby’s guilty blush crept up to the tips of her stolen hat.
    “His stall’s just over yonder.” The woman pointed at a tent made of stiff white canvas about ten feet away. “Henry’s got three sisters, all gorgeous seamstresses. Most of the year, their needles fly only for the vestments of the church’s mystery plays, but the girls always manage something small and special for the Faire. Their work takes my breath away.”
    The tent’s flaps were open, and there, under an awning, stood the stout man whose cart she and Miles had tried to hop like a freight train that morning. The man who had swiped Miles’s hat. A small crowd had gathered and was giving off oohs and aahs, admiring something apparently very precious. Shelby had to press up against the other fairgoers before she recognized the item drawing so many hungry eyes:
    A bright blue Dodgers cap.
    “Admire the exquisite dye of this buckram visor!”Henry Tailor was deep in the throes of his sales pitch, as if the hat had always been a part of his collection, as if he had sewn it himself. “Have you ever seen such stitches? Impeccably regular, to the point of … invisibility!”
    “And when a sword slices through that felt, Henry, what then?” a man jeered. The crowd began to buzz that perhaps the visor was not the most invincible item in Henry’s collection.
    “Fools,” Henry said. “This visor is not armor, but a thing of beauty. Is it not possible that a thing can be made simply to please the eye and the heart?”
    As the fairgoers hooted, Shelby’s heart hammered in her chest, because she knew what she had to do.
    “I’ll buy the hat!” she shouted suddenly.
    “It’s not for sale!” Henry said.
    “Of course it’s for sale,” Shelby said, pushing aside her nerves about her awful English accent, pushing aside a few startled people, pushing aside everything but her need to get the hat. It was important to Miles, and Miles was important to her. “Here,” she cried, “take my bonnet in exchange! My, um, father bought it for me this morning and it doesn’t, um, fit.”
    Henry looked up, and Shelby had a moment of panic—certainly he would know she’d stolen the bonnet. Only, when he tilted his head at Shelby, he didn’t even seem to register that the hat had once belonged tohim. “Yes, that bonnet does make your ears stick out. But that’s not enough.”
    What? She didn’t have big ears! Shelby was about to give Henry a piece of her mind when she remembered what was important here.
    “Come now! That hat is old, its material faded!” She pointed an accusing finger. “And what manner of wickedness do those letters emblazoned on the front signify?”
    “Are they letters?” someone in the crowd asked.
    “I don’t know how to read,” said another.
    And it was