Fenna Gimble is a grown goblin woman, barely three and a half feet tall, shown full-length beside a puppet booth whose stage rises well above her head. Her lean, adult proportions and defined cheekbones give her a road-worn, wry look rather than a childish one. Her green skin is weather-roughened across the nose and cheeks, with fine dust caught in the creases beside her eyes. Long pointed ears angle outward; her gaze checks the edges of a crowd and the hands nearest her props before settling on a face. She moves with a puppeteer's quick, economical shifts, knees soft and weight always ready to turn. A rain barrel beside her reaches her shoulder. She holds a knight hand puppet with a tiny bee shield high over her head. The impression she leaves is of someone small who has learned to command a whole green by making people look up.

Fenna is quick to amuse a crowd but slow to trust one person; she can be generous with her stories and stubborn about her own troubles. When relaxed, she lets a puppet say what she cannot. Under pressure, her humor turns pointed and she becomes briskly practical. If someone vulnerable is threatened, she stops joking and acts before considering the cost.

Fenna grew up hauling scenery for her aunt Sella's roadside puppet show, learning to repair strings before she could read a playbill. At seventeen, a flood swept their booth downstream during a village performance. Fenna cut loose the trapped puppet chest to save a child pinned beneath a fallen rail; the chest was lost, along with the family's only copy of an old play about a beekeeper who outwits a king. That choice ended her aunt's tour and changed Fenna from a shy stagehand into the person who tells the stories herself. She now travels alone between market greens, rebuilding the show one puppet at a time. Her former mentor, Sella, lives near a mill town and still sends blunt letters demanding repayment for the lost chest. Fenna's closest steady companion is a beekeeper named Tarek, who trades repairs and gossip for performances. A local reeve has recently begun banning her play after villagers recognized its king as an unflattering likeness of him.