“I didn’t touch your sodding crossbow,” said Bess, who had watched from the hovel doorway during the search. “What would I do with a crossbow?”

“You might have given it to your wee lover-man, Robin Goodfellow.”

“No I didn’t. I wouldn’t give that two-faced scalawag the dust off my shoe.”

“Little chance of that, good Snug,” I told the joiner. Dead obvious, then, that news of the Puck’s demise had not yet reached the realm of the Mechanicals. I made my way out of the shop into the street. “Thank you for lunch, but I must be off. You sure you won’t join me? Perhaps you can look for your friend Bottom.” I confess, I am accustomed to traveling in the company of my own personal nitwit, and until Drool was liberated I thought Snug might suffice. An attending idiot can be a whetstone for the wit, and, in the event of bears or other beasts, a fine distraction while a quick and agile fool makes his escape.

“No, I gots work, but if Bottom’s alive, please to tell him how splendid and frightening my lion is. RAWR!”

“Shut up!” said Madam Snug, who appeared in the doorway. “You can tell your elfin friends they can stop here if they need a rest from forest life. Always happy to help a weary traveler.”

“Oh my,” said the puppet Jones (under my control), “the Puck made a right deep impression on you, didn’t he?”

“Did not. He was a crooked little tomcat, he was. You be on your way, now, puppet.”

“And a fond farewell to you, madam,” said I as I tucked Jones down the back of my jerkin and scampered away.

Was, she had said. He was a crooked little tomcat. I pondered it as I made my way over the fields and orchards that surrounded the city and into the forest. The ninny’s wife? A missing crossbow? The weaver Bottom not returned from the forest overnight? Everyone in the city terrified of the forest people, yet the young lovers two nights away and Egeus sending me, a stranger, out to murder his daughter’s suitor without so much as a glance at my CV? A duke and a queen overly curious about what the Puck had been doing in the forest before he was killed, and neither overly concerned with who had done the killing. Peradventure, I was not the first assassin sent into the woods this wedding week.

*

I thought it best to begin my search where the Puck had fallen, so I made my way to the path on which Blacktooth and the watch had carried me into town. It was easy going for a bit, a wide path under a canopy of massive trees, so I took time to note the annoying and uncomfortable things that filled the forest, ferns and thorns, all the time keeping watch for any wolves, bears, or dragons that might find a winsome fool delicious. I moved as nimble and spry as in my youth, although I could not say from where this vigor sprung, for I was still less than two days from starved and drowned. But upon my spirit I felt a dull ache, a hunger—no, a hollowness. Had it been so long since I had been on my own that a mere hour alone was making a shell of me?

“More of a bellend,” said the puppet Jones. (Yes, I was working him, but I pretended it was magic.)

“What would you know?” said I. “Nothing more than an empty head on a stick, you are.”

“In that we are of a kind. And both move at the whim of cruel masters.”

“That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Aye, you’re not lonesome, you git, you’re craving your freedom.”

I’d had no master but love for my two years with the pirates, and now, once again, I was doing the bidding of a pair of scheming royals, under threat of death.

“Oh balls,” I said to Jones, choking him somewhat to make sure I had his attention. “I am a fool.”

ENTER RUMOUR, PAINTED FULL OF TONGUES

“And with that, the bloody obvious rose like a viper to bite the fool on his bottom.”

“Ahhhh!” said I, jumping straight up perhaps a yard and controlling my fluids only just. He was an annoyingly tall fellow, thin and pale, wrapped in a robe and wearing a hat, both quilted with what appeared to be human tongues that moved even as he stood, his long scone of a nose so turned up I might have, with better light, seen his brain writhing in its den. Whether he had stepped out from behind a tree or fallen out of one, I did not know, for there was no crunch of leaves or brush of branch, he was just bloody there. “Who are you?”

“I am Rumour, planner of plots, seer of schemes, teller of tales, a humble narrator, at your service.”

“I smell a device,” said I. The tongues on Rumour’s robe waggled at me and I jumped away, holding Jones en garde. “Back, thou skulking loony.”

“Loony? Moi?” he said in barely passable fucking French. “You were the one talking to a puppet.”

“I thought I was alone. And besides, conversation frightens off bears.”

“No, it doesn’t. And you aren’t alone, silly fool.”

“Well not now, but before you crept up like some tongue-covered spider . . .”

“Not me. You’ve been followed this last hour by a squirrel.” Without looking, Rumour pointed a long finger up to a tree behind him. Indeed, a red, horn-eared squirrel peered down from a branch. It chirped and scrambled to the far side of the tree. “See?”

“You saw it there just now and you’re trying to be clever. That is a coincidental squirrel.”

“No, it has been over you since you entered the forest. You probably would have heard it had you not been nattering on to your puppet while you stumbled along aimlessly.”