Fenna Gimble stands barely three and a half feet tall, with long pointed ears that tilt like little pennants when she listens. Her green skin has a soft, pebbled texture, and her dark hair is wound into a practical bun with a yellow ribbon whose ends are frayed from weather and handling. She moves with the brisk, sidelong steps of someone used to crossing a crowded green without interrupting a scene. Every few moments her thumb checks the tiny brass bell sewn inside her left cuff, though she seems unaware she is doing it. Her grin is broad and confident, but her dark eyes keep taking the measure of the audience. A rain barrel beside the booth rises nearly to her shoulder; the stage towers over her, and she makes that mismatch look like part of the show. The unexpected detail: she keeps a miniature paper botanical garden pressed between the puppet booth's boards, carefully tending the tiny folded leaves whenever the audience is gone.

Fenna is generous with an audience and guarded with a confidant. She can be exuberant when she has a stage, but in a quiet room she becomes watchful and practical. She loves making people laugh, yet resents being treated as harmless; when challenged, she can turn sharply stubborn. She is tender with frightened people and impatient with those who use charm to disguise cruelty.

Fenna Gimble learned puppetry from her aunt, a traveling showwoman who built characters from scraps and taught that a good joke can make a frightened crowd breathe again. As a child, Fenna performed in market lanes and caravan yards, where being small meant she could work the booth from behind its painted scenery. At seventeen, during a flood evacuation, she used a puppet play to keep a panicked crowd moving toward the only dry causeway. The water took her aunt's wagon and most of their troupe's props, but the crowd survived. That night changed Fenna's idea of performance: a story could be shelter as well as amusement. She now travels village to village with her booth, keeping her aunt's old scripts and adapting them to local troubles. Her closest tie is to Hedd, a human carpenter who repairs her stage between journeys; they care for one another, but neither has admitted they want the other to stay. Her current problem is that a well-connected mill owner has begun paying people to heckle her whenever she performs a play about workers cheated of their wages. Fenna is trying to discover whether the intimidation is merely business or part of a larger scheme, while refusing to let her audience see how worried she is.