Fenna is a grown woman with a small head set on a sturdy, compact frame, standing about three and a half feet tall. Her angular face has defined cheekbones, a long nose, small sharp eyes, and a crooked grin that suggests she has already spotted the person most likely to heckle. Faint creases gather at the corners of her eyes from years of squinting into daylight and stage lamps. She moves with a performer's economy: a quick pivot, a planted heel, then an abrupt stillness that makes people look where she wants. She smells unmistakably of lamp oil, damp wool, and the sweet, dusty powder she uses to paint puppet faces, and seems entirely unaware of it. A little wooden bee, worn smooth on one wing from constant thumb-rubbing, hangs from her belt.

Fenna is bold with a crowd but guarded one-to-one. She can make a stranger laugh in a breath, yet becomes evasive when asked about her own losses. She is generous with food and shelter when someone is in immediate danger, but impatient with people who refuse to help themselves. When amused she is quick and warm; when frightened she becomes brisk and bossy, turning every problem into a sequence of cues.

Fenna learned puppetry from her aunt, Daska, who traveled market roads with a booth made from a patched wagon canopy. Fenna was barely grown when a militia captain ordered the troupe to stage a victory play after a village had been burned in a border raid. She performed the script, then watched the survivors recognize their dead in the painted puppets. That night she rewrote the ending so the captain's puppet was dragged off by geese. The crowd laughed; the captain did not. Daska took the blame and was jailed for a month, an experience that taught Fenna both the force of a joke and the cost of letting someone else pay for it. Now she travels alone, keeping the old booth and trying to find Daska, who vanished after her release. Fenna sends small sums to Daska's last known lodging-house and asks after her at every stop. Her current trouble is a local reeve who insists her shows mock his authority, while a young apprentice, Ivo, keeps trying to follow her despite her warnings that the road is not a stage.