“Jalan!” Snorri’s voice.

I stuck my head out through the flaps into the starlight, far from pleased. Snorri stood with one thick arm gripping the wagon bed, arresting its motion. “Come.”

I hadn’t the breath to tell him that was what I was trying to do. Instead I slipped out, lacing up what needed to be laced. “Yes?” Not keeping the temper from my voice.

“Come.” He led off between the nearest wagons. I could hear weeping now. Wailing.

Snorri followed the field’s gradient, letting it lead us a little way out from the wagons and carts encircling Taproot’s tent. Here several dozen of the circus folk huddled before a bright fire.

“A child died.” Snorri set a hand to my shoulder as if offering comfort. “Unborn.”

“The pregnant woman?” A foolish thing to say—it had to be a pregnant woman. Daisy. I remembered her name.

“The babe’s buried.” He nodded to a low mound in the dirt out past the fire, snug between two old grave markers. “We should show our respects.”

I sighed. No more fun for Jal tonight. I felt sorry for the woman, of course, but the troubles of people I don’t know never reached that far into me. My father, in one of his rare moments of coherence, declared it to be a symptom of youth. My youth, at least. He called on God to visit compassion upon me as a burden to be carried in later life. I was just impressed that he’d noticed me or my ways this once, and of course it’s always nice for a cardinal to remember to call on God every now and then.

We sat a little apart from the main group, though close enough to feel the fire’s heat.

“How’s the hand?” I asked.

“Hurts more, feels better.” He held out the appendage in question and flexed it slightly, wincing. “She removed a lot of the poison.”

Thankfully Snorri omitted greater detail. Some folk will seek to entertain you with the gory details of their ailments. My brother Martus would have painted each glistening drop of pus for me in one of his woe-is-me monologues for which the only remedy is a swift exit.

The night held enough warmth, combined with the fire and my recent exercise, to leave me pleasantly sleepy. I lay back on the ground, without complaint for the hardness of it or the dust in my hair. For a moment or three I watched the stars and listened to the soft weeping. I yawned once and sleep took me.

Strange dreams hunted me that night. I wandered an empty circus haunted by the memory of the eyes behind that porcelain mask but finding only the dancers, each sobbing in her bed, and breaking into bright fragments as I reached to touch them. Cherri was there, Lula too, and they broke together, speaking a single word. Quarry. The night fractured, cracks running through tents, wheels, barrels; an elephant bellowed unseen in the darkness. My head filled with light until at last I opened my eyes to keep from being blinded.