The trade fair had six days left when Torvi set the little marionette on the edge of her table and said, "Make him do something."
I looked at her. "Here?"
"Here. Now." She jerked her chin at the gallery, where merchants were drifting past her clocks without stopping. "They walk right by the music boxes. They walk right by the toys. Nobody stops for a thing that sits still." She folded her arms. "Make him not sit still."
So I did.
I stood behind the table, picked up his strings, and let him wake up. He lifted his head. He looked left, then right, the way someone does when they hear their name called in a crowd. He spotted a merchant's dropped glove on the floor in front of the table, climbed down the table leg one careful handhold at a time, and tried to carry the glove back up. It was three times his size. He fell over. He got up, brushed himself off with great dignity, and tried again.
By the third try, there were nine people standing in front of the table.
By the fifth, there were twenty. One of them was laughing so hard she had to hold onto her husband. When the little wooden man finally hauled the glove onto the tabletop, stood on it, and bowed, they applauded.
The merchant whose glove it was gave me a copper bit for it. I gave him his glove back.
Torvi sold three music boxes in the next hour. She did not say anything about it. She just slid a mug of the bitter brown drink across the table to me, which from her was practically a speech.
That night, I could not sleep.
I lay on my cot between the moon clock and the brass birds, listening to the Anvil. I kept seeing the crowd. Twenty people, stopped in a busy gallery, watching a wooden man fight a glove.
In my old world, I had grown up watching puppet theater. There was the old kind, with the black-hooded puppeteers you were supposed to pretend you could not see, and the little traveling shows at summer festivals, with a painted box and a curtain and a man doing all the voices. I had watched them for hours as a boy. I had made my first marionette because of one.
This world did not have that. I had been here nearly two years and I had never seen a single puppet show that was not mine. Not in Halvard. Not on the road. Not in the Hold. There were minstrels and actors and acrobats, Bolli told me, at the big fairs down in the kingdoms. But nobody had ever made little people of wood and cloth and told a story with them.
I got up, lit the lamp, and started drawing a stage.
It took me four days.
It was a box, really. A tall wooden frame on four legs, about as high as my chest, so a grown man could stand behind it and work his hands over the top without being seen. I gave it a little arch at the front, carved with vines. I painted a backdrop on a sheet of canvas: a castle on a hill, a forest, a bit of sky. Torvi found me a pair of old velvet curtains, wine red and only a little moth-eaten, and rigged them on a cord so they would open with one pull.
Then I made a cast.
A hero, square-jawed and very serious, with a tin sword. A princess, with a yellow wool braid and a crown of gold paper. A servant, round and worried, with big hands and a face that looked like it had never had a good day in its life. And a dragon. The dragon took the longest. It was green, made of jointed sections like a long wooden snake, with a hinged jaw and two sad, droopy eyes, and when you worked its strings properly, it moved like something that had been asleep in a cave for a hundred years and did not appreciate being woken.
I wrote the play in a single evening. It was very simple. The princess is carried off by the dragon. The hero rides out to save her. The hero falls into a river, gets lost in a forest, and is chased off by an angry goose, so the servant has to go alone. He creeps into the dragon's cave, shaking with terror, and finds the princess and the dragon sitting at a little table.
Having tea.
The dragon only wanted company. Nobody ever visited. The princess had been having a lovely time. The servant, after a great deal of nervous stammering, sits down and has a cup too. The hero arrives at the very end, soaking wet, with the goose still attached to the back of his trousers, and demands to know what is going on.
I read it over twice. It was silly. I liked it very much.
Torvi read it once, without expression, and handed it back.
"The goose is good," she said.
I put on the show on the last afternoon of the fair.
Torvi let me set up the stage beside her table, at the end of the gallery where the crowd was thickest. I stood behind it, under the curtain, with my arms raised and the strings of four puppets wound around my fingers. I could not see the audience. I could only hear them: the shuffle of feet, a child asking what the box was for, a merchant telling his partner they did not have time for this.
I pulled the cord. The curtains opened.
I had been nervous all morning. My hands had shaken while I set up. But the moment the princess stepped out onto the little painted stage, the shaking stopped. I knew this. I had done this a thousand times, in another life, for nobody. Now there were people out there.
I did all the voices. The princess was bright and bossy. The hero was deep and pompous, and grew higher and more panicked every time something went wrong. The servant mumbled and stammered and apologized to everything, including a tree. The dragon spoke very slowly, in a low, sad, rumbling voice, like someone talking with his mouth full of gravel.
They laughed at the hero falling in the river. They laughed harder at the goose. When the servant crept into the cave, terrified, and the dragon turned its long head toward him and slowly asked, "Sugar?", there was a moment of complete silence.
Then the whole end of the gallery burst out laughing.
I do not remember the rest very well. I remember the hero arriving with the goose. I remember a child shrieking with joy. I remember my arms aching from being held up so long, and not caring. When the curtains closed, the applause went on so long that I had to come out from behind the stage just to make it stop.
There were maybe sixty people. Dwarves and humans both. A young dwarf mother was wiping her eyes. Bolli, who had apparently been in the crowd the whole time, was standing on a crate, clapping above his head.
I bowed. It felt very strange. Nobody had ever applauded anything I did before.
They came to the table after.
Most of them just wanted to see the puppets up close. They turned the dragon over, worked its jaw, and asked if it was for sale. A few asked if I would do the show again tomorrow. The fair was over tomorrow. I said so, and they looked genuinely disappointed.
Two of them stayed after the others had gone.
The first was a thin, sharp-faced human woman in a sea-green coat, with gray hair pinned up tight and a heavy silver ring on her thumb. She had stood at the very back during the show and had not laughed once. But she had not left, either.
Human Lv. 12 Merchant
"Corva Lisse," she said. "Lisse and Daughters, of Kessaria. Who owns this?"
"Greymantle's hall," said Torvi.
Corva Lisse looked at Torvi, then at me. "And who does the voices?"
"I do," I said.
"Hm." She picked up the dragon and held it up to the light, studying the joints, the way you look at something you are deciding whether to buy. "In Kessaria, there are three hundred taverns on the harbor alone. Every one of them hires a fiddler and a singer on market nights, and every one of them is looking for something the tavern next door doesn't have." She set the dragon down. "Could a person learn to do what you just did?"
I thought about it honestly.
"Not alone," I said. "Not all of it. I've been doing this a long time. But you don't need one person to do it all."
And then, because she was listening, I told her.
I told her about a bigger stage, on a cart, that could fold up and travel. About two or three people working the puppets, each one handling only one or two, so they could learn quickly. About other people, actors, to speak the voices from beside the stage, so the puppeteers could keep their minds on their hands. About a fiddler or a piper to play while the scenes changed, and a drum for when the dragon came on. About performing for a noble's feast for a fee, or setting up in a market square and charging a few copper bits a head. About new plays, and new puppets, so people would come back.
She listened to all of it without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a while.
"What do you call it?" she said.
I opened my mouth, and realized I did not know the word for it in this world. There probably was not one.
"A string-play," said Bolli, who had wandered over behind me. "Isn't it? It's a play. With strings."
Corva Lisse looked at him. Then she looked back at me.
"A string-play," she said, trying it. "Yes. That will do."
The second merchant was a big, red-faced, cheerful man named Hob Ferris, who kept an inn on the road between Halvard and Thornvale and had come up the mountain to buy a clock for his common room. He did not have Corva Lisse's money or her harbor. He just wanted the show.
"My girls would love it," he said. "And the travelers. Rainy nights, nothing to do but drink and fight. This'd keep them in their seats."
Torvi did the selling. I stood by and tried not to look surprised at the numbers.
Corva Lisse bought the whole show: the stage, the four puppets, the backdrop, the velvet curtains, and the script, which I copied out for her that night in a clean hand, with notes in the margins about where to pause for the laughs. She also ordered a second set, with new puppets and a new play, to be delivered with the summer caravan. Hob Ferris could not afford the full stage, so he bought a smaller one I promised to build, with a single marionette and a few simple scenes he could do himself.
Between them, it came to a little over four gold crowns. My share, after Torvi's tenth, was a little under four.
It was not Rosamund money. But Rosamund had taken five months. The stage had taken four days. The marionettes I never planned to sell.
That night, packing the dragon into a straw-lined box for the journey to Kessaria, I found myself hesitating over it. I had liked that dragon. I had liked its slow, sad voice. Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
"Second thoughts?" said Torvi, from her bench.
"I don't know if it'll work," I said. "For them. Corva Lisse isn't a performer. She's never worked a puppet in her life. Hob Ferris has two daughters and an inn to run. They might put on one show, and it falls flat, and the stage ends up in a cellar."
Torvi did not look up from her work. "Might."
"They might not, too."
"They might not." She held a tiny gear up to the light. "Either way, they've paid. You've made something good and sold it to someone who wanted it. What they do with it is their business." She set the gear in its place. "That's how it works, lad. You don't get to follow every piece out the door."
I closed the lid on the dragon.
She was right. It still felt strange. But it was a good kind of strange.
The fair ended. The merchants went back down the mountain, and the Hold went quiet again, back to the Anvil and the forges and the long, cold dark.
Halla Ringmaker delivered my armor a week later, and I wore it on the next hunt. The mail was heavier than I expected and lighter than I feared, and when a blind gnawer's teeth closed on my forearm in the second gallery, they slid off the rings and left nothing but a bruise. I stood there staring at my arm until Gudrun shouted at me.
I made Hob Ferris's little stage and his marionette, a cheerful round innkeeper with a towel over one shoulder. I made two more dolls for Torvi's table, smaller and quicker than Rosamund. I went down below the Bellows Gate twice more. In the second month after the fair, in a long tunnel full of stonelings, I reached level eighteen.
And on the sixty-first day after I had paid her, Sigrun came to the Ticking Hall with something long wrapped in oiled cloth.
She set it on the bench without a word and unwrapped it.
It was a starsteel short sword. A little longer than Torvi's, and a little narrower, with the same cold, starry shimmer in the blade. The guard was plain steel. The grip was wrapped in dark gray leather, and the pommel was a smooth round weight of starsteel, heavier than it looked. When I picked it up, the weight sat back toward my hand instead of pulling forward, so the blade felt like it wanted to move instead of fall.
I swung it, carefully, in the space between the benches. It went where I sent it. It did not try to pull my arm out of its socket.
"It's perfect," I said.
She shrugged, but I saw her ears go a little pink under her soot. I paid her the rest. She left without saying goodbye, which I was learning was how dwarves said goodbye to people they liked.
Then I picked up Torvi's sword from beside my cot, where it had lived for half a year, and held it out to her, hilt first.
She took it. She turned it over in her hands for a long moment, the way she had when she first gave it to me. Then she wrapped it back in its cloth and put it away in the cupboard at the back of the hall, and locked the cupboard, and hung the key around her neck again.
"Welcome back," she Said
I was fairly sure she was not talking to me.
That night I wrote in the ledger.
Day 768.
Level: 18.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 15.
Armor: worn. Tested. A gnawer could not get through it.
Sword: mine. Starsteel, from Sigrun. Torvi's went back in the cupboard.
Puppet theater: My first real show. About sixty people.
Sold: the whole show to Corva Lisse of Kessaria. Made a small stage for Hob Ferris, for his inn. A second show ordered for the summer caravan.
Bolli named it. String-play
I looked at the page. Then I added one more line.
The dragon only wanted company.
I am not sure why I wrote that. I sat looking at it for a long time, with Clara in the corner and the clocks ticking all around us. Then I closed the book and went to sleep.