Eleven-year-old Adam loved to travel through the open roads of thirteenth-century England with his father, a wandering minstrel, and his red spaniel, Nick. But when his father suddenly disappears and Nick is stolen, Adam finds himself alone searching these same roads filled with rich merchants, pilgrims with cockleshells upon their hats, farming folk driving pigs to the fair, minstrels and priests, saints and thieves—and somewhere in the crowd his father and his dog.