The absurdity brought a light smile to his face as he made his way through the peddlers selling useless junk and the smooth talkers trying to get the punters to step right up to their stalls and try to win ‘magnificent prizes’ if they could only knock the milk bottles down. He did, however, stop once or twice at the odd merchant trying to hawk their wares when the fancy took him. One wizened-looking griffon claimed to have once been the court wizard of some count or another. Handy didn’t believe that for a minute given the state of staff he carried, broken and worn as it was. However, he humoured the old bird as he was friendly and amicable, and so Handy parted with a crown or two’s worth of bric-a-brac in the form of a small booklet containing some nonsense chicken scratch he didn’t understand and a bracelet that looked like it was made of gilded copper. If you went to a festival and didn’t have at least one purchase you regretted, you were clearly doing it wrong, or so his uncle had said when they went to a flea market a decade ago. That never did get that lawnmower they bought to work properly...