Rownie and Rowan used to run the dockside errands together. Rowan would usually have a spare coin or two, earned by singing on the Fiddleway or doing odd jobs for the stone movers near Broken Wall. He would use it to buy each of them some breakfast—a greasy fish pastry or a strange piece of fruit from foreign places—and then the brothers would eat their breakfast while sitting on some unused stretch of pier, dangling their legs over the side and watching the barges sail by.

Sometimes they made up stories about where the barges had come from, and where they might be going. Sometimes they imagined how fights against pirate fleets would unfold all around them, upstream and downstream, up and down the pylons of the Fiddleway Bridge, up and down the piers and the switchbacking streets behind them. Sometimes Rowan had enough to buy an extra fish pastry, and they would split the third one. He always gave his younger brother the larger piece.

Three pigeons watched fox-masked Rownie from a rooftop, and then turned away and pecked for seeds in the thatch. Rownie wondered if they were Graba’s pigeons. He wondered if Graba had sent any Grubs on riverside errands today, to bring back fish heads or strange packages, or maybe to keep watch for him—or to keep watch for Rowan.

Rownie looked over his shoulder to see if Grubs were following. He saw others following him instead.

A small crowd of curious people had been pulled into his wake, diverted from wherever else they had intended to go and whatever they had intended to do. Some were old and some young. Some wore more expensive clothes and others less. They followed from a safe distance, watching him, wanting to see where he would go and what he might do.

It was working. Rownie carried an audience with him.

Not everyone noticed as he went by with poise and purpose in his mask. Some went about their business and were not at all distracted by a fox face. Their eyes missed him somehow. Their attention slipped around him. He was something strange, something that should not really be there, so passersby who were not his audience passed him by and assumed that he was not there if he was not supposed to be.

Rownie walked in daylight with a fox face over his own, and some people couldn’t see him at all. He was hiding and proclaiming himself, both at once. He didn’t know how this could possibly work, and he didn’t want to think about it too much in case it stopped working, so he just kept moving. He let the fox mask show him how to move.

The audience was larger now. He could tell by the noise they made, all packed together into the narrow, winding staircase. Rownie glanced behind him to see just how many there were.