“Well,” the goblin said, “please tell him hello if you see him. In the meanwhile, I wonder if you might be interested in remaining with us. We have many performances to make—we play at the Broken Wall tomorrow and down by the docks on the day after that—and we very certainly could use another voice, another pair of hands. Is this something you would like?”

Rownie blinked. Yes, he would like to stand onstage again. Yes, definitely yes. “It might,” he said aloud, still suspicious. Living in Graba’s household had taught him to be suspicious whenever anyone offered him exactly what he wanted. “Can I watch the rest of the play first?”

“Of course,” said Semele.

Rownie finished his tea and set the mug on the ground. Semele pointed to the back of the wagon. Rownie half walked and half crawled underneath the stage. He emerged between the cloth’s edge and a wagon wheel.

He could hear a fiddle and a flute from the wagon’s roof, and then singing, beautiful singing. He paused to listen, and he wondered what to do.

He did not actually get to decide. Metal shrieked against metal. Wood and brass talons closed around him from behind.

“Where is my gear oil, runt?” Graba hissed in Rownie’s ear.

She lifted him up with a bird’s leg as though he weighed less than dust or a name or a crumpled scrap of paper. Then she wrapped her arm around his waist and set off with long strides.

Rownie squirmed. Graba held him close and sniffed.

“You smell wrong,” Graba said. “You smell like thieving and tin. You smell unsettled. Did Semele brew you Change potions?”

“No, Graba,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t actually say it. She held him tight, and his breath came out in short gasps.

Graba strode across the green and onto the roadway, moving fast. Rownie thought furiously about different ways he might escape or explain himself. He thought and thought and came up with nothing and more nothing.

They passed beneath the statue of the Lord Mayor. Graba spat at his feet. They crossed the Fiddleway and passed beneath the Clock Tower. Graba spat at the foot of the tower.

Graba strode into Southside. They passed through an open lot of hard-packed dirt and broken plaster walls. It was a place where old buildings had fallen over, and new ones had not yet come and might never come. Night birds pecked in the dirt. Two peacocks slept on the top of a brick chimney that stood alone, without walls.

“This was home, a long while ago,” Graba said as they went through. “This was mine. Every place I put down my shack is mine, though none of them ever own me.”

Rownie said nothing. Breathing was all he could do.