Fenna is a grown goblin woman, barely three and a half feet tall, with a mature, self-assured face and a grin broad enough to look like the start of a story. Her long ears angle outward like little pennants. She moves with the quick, practiced balance of someone who has spent years working around ropes, wheels, and restless children. Her smell arrives before her voice: lamp oil, damp canvas, and the sweet burnt-sugar scent of the chestnuts she snacks on between performances. An unexpected detail for a traveling entertainer: she keeps a neatly folded, grease-stained map of local wells tucked in her belt and checks it before she chooses a place to perform.

Fenna is buoyant in public but sharply observant in private. She loves a crowd's laughter and dislikes being the center of a serious conversation. With children, she is patient and conspiratorial; with officials, she becomes direct and stubborn. When tired, her jokes grow gentler but her patience for bullies vanishes.

Fenna learned puppetry from her aunt, who traveled between hamlets with a patched booth and a trunk of wooden characters. At twelve, Fenna was meant to perform a comic tale during a flood-market, but the river took the footbridge and stranded families on the far bank. She improvised a rescue story from the booth, keeping frightened children calm while adults organized a rope crossing. The experience changed her: she stopped treating performance as an escape from trouble and began using it to help people face trouble together. Her aunt later died, leaving Fenna the booth and a bundle of unfinished puppet heads. Fenna now travels alone, though she exchanges letters with her former stage partner, Paku, who settled down to raise a family. Her current difficulty is that a local reeve has begun charging performers for permits and has threatened to seize her booth. Fenna is trying to keep her routes open without turning the villages that shelter her into enemies.