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In the late fall and early winter, when their routes coincided, the Folly House traveled alongside the gypsy caravans like a crow taking up with a flock of migrating sparrows. The traveling theater was a giant, groaning structure, clearly of foreign make, with strange angled windows and arches and eaves in places that didn't quite make sense. It was drawn by a company of six horses, each of them mismatched and getting on in years but impressive still in the morning fog, when their silhouettes creeping across the top of the moors resembled something from an old story, set in a time before the world had grown smaller and everything less grand and mysterious along with it. Only up close could one see the glossy black paint peeling from the Folly House's sides in strips like bark sloughing off an ailing tree.

Now the theatre had stopped for the night. A yellow lantern-glow was beginning to bloom in its windows, which came in all different shapes and sizes, and were arranged seemingly at random with no regard for the building's interior.

The horses grazed peaceably nearby, and Feste was sitting on one. It was a large draft animal; as a result his dangling feet barely even reached the lower line of its belly. He was juggling what at first appeared to be half a dozen or so small, white balls, but were actually eggs, which he demonstrated when he made a sort of shrugging motion and sent one arcing off through the air to land with a splat at the feet of someone returning from the forest with firewood.

The tip of Feste's tongue was poking out in a show of concentration as he juggled. He glanced at Lytka once, and then again, irritably, as if she had just now appeared out of thin air for the sole purpose of distracting him. Then he bent himself over backwards so that his head was dangling directly over the horse's behind, upside down. He continued juggling straight up into the air without looking.

"I'm terribly sorry," he said, not sounding very sorry at all. "It seems I mistook you for a Wolf emerging from the forest. Your curling mane is most fearsome."

His face, which looked peculiar enough upright, was doubly bizarre in reverse. He wore the whiteface makeup of a traveling mummer, pale and stark but for the black outline around his eyes, the thin false set of eyebrows drawn on, presumably, at least a centimeter above his natural ones (it was difficult to tell from a distance), and the captious cherry-red of his lips. His normal expressions -- theatrical to begin with -- were exaggerated to the point that he looked more like a caricature of a person than a real one.

"There, now you've heard it straight from the horse's a**," he added. "Your suspicions are confirmed. Off with you! Go! I have important things to do."

Like, apparently, more juggling.

Feste pursed his lips at Lytka. Then he brightened.

"Break more eggs," he replied, sitting up. With his narrow, straight back facing Lytka, he caught three eggs in his left hand, deftly transferred two of them to his armpit, and then caught the remaining three in his right. He next reached back to undo a tie at the base of his long socklike hat and tugged it off. Underneath his hair was mostly stuck down with white theater wrappings, but bits of it peeked out at unlikely angles, like the ruffled feathers of a damp baby bird. It was an ordinary not-quite-blond, not-quite-brunette color, nearly the exact shade of dirty dishwater or straw left out in the rain. It was exceedingly plain in comparison to the rest of him.

He carefully deposited the eggs into his hat. When he was finished he stood up on the horse's back, turned around, and sat back down facing Lytka with his hat cradled in his lap. "To make dinner, that is. Or breakfast? I'm always losing track. Either way, I'm sure it's much more important than whatever you're doing." He eyed Lytka's armful of firewood as if it were a pile of manure.

A jingling of bells heralded Feste's appearance long before his silhouette appeared trudging past the gypsy caravans through the fog. His cap dangled loosely in his hand like a child's toy, its tip almost dragging on the ground. He wore no wrappings on his head today; his hair, badly cut and ungroomed, stuck up in every direction as if he'd just been tumbling about in whatever manner he practiced for his performances. His jingling, however, was slightly off -- he seemed to be walking with a slight limp. Overall his comportment was rather forlorn, as if the melancholy of the cold and the fog were contagious, and he slouched on toward his mysterious destination with the reluctance of a man (or woman) approaching the executioner's axe.

When he noticed Lytka toiling over her laundry, all traces of weariness suddenly vanished from his bearing. He replaced the cap on his head with a flourish and hastened over to her boiling pot, only to jab at its contents with an accusatory finger. "Aha!" he cried. "What might you be cooking in your stew-pot, young Wolf? Baby's fingers? Widow's ears?" He leaned forward to take a prodigious whiff of steam and contorted his face into a convincing facsimile of revulsion. "Just as I suspected -- a foul concoction. The horror! You haven't even bothered to remove their clothes! Well?"

He plopped down next to the fire and pulled his knees up to his chest, scowling at Lytka and warming his hands simultaneously. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"Play what act?" Feste said innocently, clasping his hands around his knees. "I've been in many acts in many plays, but this scene doesn't ring a bell." He paused and then raised a finger as if in sudden thought. The bells attached to his wrist contributed a shrill tinkle. "No -- hark, it does! Act four, scene one: Eye of newt and toe of frog / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog. But those are your lines, not mine, I'm afraid."

He gazed Lytka for a moment in silence, waggling his fingers at her comically, and then said, "Alas, a passing nobleman mistook me for a hare this morning, and his hounds proved willing to course me. I believe it was the ears." He lifted one of the socklike extensions of his cap and let it drop again with a subdued jingle. "Or perhaps, more likely, my little rabbit mouth, which never seems to stop moving."

He rested his chin on his knees and regarded Lytka sweetly. "And what happened to your hair?"