A bunch of little wooden human puppets jumped and danced across the stage, going about their business, blissfully ignorant of what was coming next. They were beautifully made—from creamy white polished pine through to darkest mahogany, they were as varied as the citizens of Holbard who stood watching the show.
Anders heard the gasps from the audience below when red dragon puppets suddenly appeared, swooping low over the little people puppets, who scattered and ran about the stage, bobbing up and down on their sticks. One swooped to pick up the smallest puppet, kidnapping a child.
“How are they going to show—” Rayna began, but she got no further. Somehow a dragon puppet breathed fire—not a cascade of white-and-gold fabric, or some silly trick, but real fire. The flames raced along the fabric of the people puppets’ clothes, curling around each seam and enveloping the tiny figures until there was nothing left.
“How do they make it white?” Rayna whispered. “And with those gold sparks? It looks like real dragonsfire.”
“It’s a kind of salt, I think,” he whispered back. “And iron filings for the gold sparks. This is the best battle show we’ve seen.”
The puppets who hadn’t been reduced to ashes ran around the stage even more frantically. Anders and Rayna leaned over the edge of the roof in anticipation. They’d seen one tribe of shapeshifting elementals, the scorch dragons, making their attack, and now it was time for the other—the ice wolves, the heroes of the battle.
Another set of human puppets popped up on the stage, all clad in gray, and Rayna pointed. “There’s the Wolf Guard, watch!”
Beneath the wooden box the puppeteers worked some trick, and in the blink of an eye the Wolf Guard puppets turned themselves inside out—and on the inside of the puppets was sewn their wolf form! Now they were no longer guards in gray uniforms, but actual wolves, howling and creating spears of ice to drive out the dragons. The high-pitched noise was audible even above the gasps of the crowd.
“Those are some fancy puppets,” Anders said as a pair of Wolf Guards—real, living ones, one just like the pine puppet and the other like the mahogany—walked through the square on patrol, and nodded their approval as a dragon puppet came crashing down, defeated. Another dropped the tiny, kidnapped child puppet, and Anders winced. He wasn’t sure making a dragon drop a child from a great height counted as “rescue,” but he probably wasn’t meant to be thinking about that.
“Sure are fancy,” Rayna agreed. “But fancy puppets won’t feed me dinner.”
When Anders looked over, she was pulling her fishing rod from inside her coat, screwing the sections together until the handle was complete, and taking up position at the edge of the building. There was a sausage seller right below them, a wizened little man, only his gray hair and thick green coat visible from Anders’s vantage point. Rayna lowered the hook, and when he wasn’t looking, she carefully snagged one of his sausages.
Below them the crowd was still gasping over the end of the puppet show and handing up copper coins for the performers, arguing about how the dragon puppet had been made to breathe fire.
Rayna reeled the line back in quickly and carefully, swinging it around toward Anders, who unhooked the sausage. He rolled over onto his back and made it swim up and down like they’d just caught a fish, or like it was one of the puppets below.
“Don’t play with your food,” she laughed, looking down to see about getting another. It had been a genius idea of hers to use the fishing line. Nobody ever looked up for a thief.
Well, it wasn’t as true these days that nobody ever looked up, not with rumors about dragons in the skies again, but it was still better than thieving on the ground. They’d have to do that tomorrow, to get their hands on some coins.
Anders sometimes worried about the stealing, but Rayna always shrugged. “There’s no other way,” she’d say. “We’ll take care of us, and they can take care of them.”
Rayna was frowning as the sausage seller handed off the last of his wares to a customer and began packing up his stall, and she dismantled her rod, wandering over to peer down into the alleyway behind their rooftop.
“Pssst,” she called, waving Anders across to join her a minute later. “Look at that window.”
With a sinking feeling he crossed over, then leaned out to take a look. He was pretty sure he knew where this was heading. There was a little window down there, half open. “Rayna, no way,” he tried.
“Pffft, your legs are long enough,” she said. “And just think what might be inside.”
“A person!” he said. “A person might be inside!”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “A window that small, no way does it lead to a main room. It’ll be the bathroom, or the pantry. Nobody’ll see you.”
There were a dozen more arguments about why this was a bad idea, but Anders didn’t bother making them. He knew how it would end, no matter what he said. So instead, sighing, he handed his coat to her, then lowered himself off the edge of the roof.
He ended up dangling by his hands, his feet feeling around for the window ledge as Rayna gave instructions, and he began to worry he’d have to let go. It was going to hurt, if he landed on the cobblestones.
Just as he was really starting to panic, he finally found the little ledge, getting both his feet onto it. He balanced carefully as he walked his hands down the stone wall, until eventually he was low enough that he could feed himself in through the window.
He landed lightly in what turned out to be the pantry, arms windmilling as he tried to avoid tipping over into the shelves lining the small room. He stabilized and breathed out in relief.
That relief lasted about ten seconds, before he heard the sound of the front door opening. The breeze it created pushed through the rooms, and when it reached Anders in the pantry, it slammed shut the little window above him. He whirled around, reaching up to push it open again, but his heart was sinking even as he turned.
Sure enough, the lock had clicked into place. And he didn’t have the key.
He stared at his lost escape route in horror. Why did these things always happen to him?
Footsteps approached, and he spun back, searching the tiny space for a good spot to hide. After a couple of seconds of desperate consideration, he crammed himself behind a brown glazed pot almost as big as he was.
He grabbed the lid off the pot, the brine of pickled vegetables wafting up to tickle his nose, and balanced it on top of his head where he crouched. It was dark in the pantry, and if he was lucky his warm brown skin would blend in with the pots around him. Though in his experience, Anders was rarely lucky.
The footsteps stopped just outside the pantry door, which was still ajar. Through it, he could see a woman who looked like she wanted to stand out as much as he wanted to blend in. She wore a truly magnificent hat adorned with piles of expensive flowers. Her dress was large and purple, designed to take up lots of space, and she wore matching purple powder on her brown cheeks. She was clearly wealthy, and she had a haughty tilt to her chin as she leaned in to inspect herself in the hall mirror and adjust the hat.
“That Dama Barro,” she said to herself, indignant. “And Dama Chardi. I’ll show them whose sweetcakes are flat. We’ll just see who’s laughing at the next contest, won’t we?”