For thirty-two years on the road, Noll Vey had never walked onto a stage without at least three ways to hide his hands.
Even in the leanest winters, when the Palace of Wonders had been reduced to a single handcart and a patched canvas awning behind a sheep tavern, he had always kept a brass-bound table with a recessed velvet well, a tallow footlight angled to throw glare into the front row’s eyes, and a strip of smoked mirror glass that made an empty box look six inches deeper than the carpenter had built it. If the audience could see your knuckles clearly, Hesta Quill used to tell him while pinning his cuffs, you were either an honest tradesman or about to be arrested, and neither profession paid for supper.
On the octagonal stone curb of the Mere market well, there was no velvet, no smoked glass, and no footlight.
There was only grey November daylight, three hundred pairs of cold eyes, and a carved limestone body whose hands were two inches too broad for its cuffs and completely incapable of palming a dried pea, let alone a sin.
Noll rested his stone palms flat on the mossy oak rim of the water trough so every bench from the bakery porch to the Survey House steps could see them. Beside his right hip, Prit climbed onto an overturned butter firkin, braced his bony knees against the staves, and hoisted the great hall slate above his shoulder with both hands, holding…
