The rest of the troupe mumbled their good nights. Rownie stood. He felt the fox teeth with his fingertips. He wondered if he would really be able to sleep in a litchfield, surrounded by graves and goblins and possibly ghouls, with a hangman’s rope dangling in the tree branches and bird-dreams perched in the air, waiting to be dreamed. Then he yawned and followed Essa, Patch, and Nonny into the wagon. He carried the fox mask in one hand. With his other hand he checked to make sure the pebblish hello still sat safe in his pocket.

Act II, Scene IV

SEVERAL HAMMOCKS STRETCHED across the inside of the wagon, like sailors’ bedding on a barge. Rownie found an empty one, set the mask underneath it, and figured out how to climb in. It took him three tries to manage. He had never slept in a hammock before.

He didn’t think it would be possible to sleep. The bedding was unfamiliar. Straw and rope were both itchy, but in different ways, and he was accustomed to straw and not rope. But he had walked a long way when the day began and had eaten as good and filling a meal as he had ever tasted when the day was over. These two things together summoned sleep, and Rownie let it carry him off.

He dreamed that the city was also his face. The Fiddleway Bridge was the bridge of his nose, and it tickled as traffic walked across it from Northside to Southside, and from Southside to Northside. He woke up and flicked a bug away from his nose. He suspected that a Grub might have put it there, as a joke. Then he remembered that he was no longer in the company of Grubs. He opened his eyes.

Semele stood beside his hammock. She squinted at him. Dusty sunlight poured in through open window hatches in the wagon walls.

“Pigeons?” she asked.

Rownie blinked. He was only half sure where he was, and he wasn’t sure at all what she meant.

“Did you dream of pigeons?” Semele asked.

Rownie shook his head. “No pigeons.”

“Well, that is a good thing, yes.”

Rownie tried to sit up. It wasn’t easy, and he had to brace himself with both arms to manage. He didn’t know how to get out of a hammock. Finally, he flipped the thing upside down and tumbled forth.

“Has the boy injured himself?” Thomas asked from elsewhere in the wagon. “Is he fragile? Is he dead? Have we lost our little fledgling actor already?”

Essa peered down at Rownie from among the ropes and rafters. “He’s not dead,” she reported. “Not unless he’s the sort of dead who gets up and goes walking afterward.”

“Good then,” said Thomas.

Rownie got to his feet, embarrassed. Then he checked to make sure that he hadn’t crushed the fox mask as he fell. The fox grinned, undamaged.