The Seelie Market opened around them like a held breath let go. An amphitheater of noise and color, hawkers shouting wares, hot dogs thrown through the air by magic into waiting hands, and at the center a great green dragon coiled and watching, its hide furred with green hair. A stamp pressed itself onto the back of every hand as they passed the gate. Anar took one look at the arrow-sellers and was gone, promising to catch up in fifteen minutes.
It was Orimene who stopped first, mid-step, staring at a man at a tool stall. She knew him. She had watched him die. Azran turned at the sound of her, equally certain he was looking at a ghost, and the reunion ended in a tackle and a long cry. Neither could explain it. Azran remembered the manor, a hallway full of strange colors, then nothing until he woke somewhere he had once called home. He counted his toes and found nine. Orimene filled in the rest of the story he had missed: the color out of space, the party torn apart, Elra reduced to a head in a jar. Anar drifted back with his arrows and a fistful of hot dogs and recognized Azran too, from somewhere between life and death.
The smell reached them next, sugared plums on the air, pulling toward a stall of strange flat-sided fruit kept by a vulture of a man who wanted a copper and a strand of hair for each piece. Puck refused to pay in hair. The others were not given the choice. Penelope and Puck failed to resist and found the fruit in their mouths before they understood why. Orimene resisted and bit in anyway, and the fruit took her — she shrank, purpled, and rose into the air as a six-inch fairy dragon with wings and a Draconic tongue only Puck could follow. The vendor was simply gone, and the pamphlet from the gate had grown a new line of text: a warning about side effects, arriving too late to matter.
Under a tent shaped like a wizard's hat, the satyr Hugo dared them to trick him. Azran palmed a card, Anar tried a flourish, Puck played one straight, and each won a small purse of copper or silver for the effort. Then Anar tried again and made Hugo draw his own card to find it had become a hot dog, and the satyr laughed himself breathless and threw open the grand prize chest. Among the cards inside lay one of carved ivory, edged with a protective geometry, its face showing a house and an Ace. Azran's reading of it suggested it could open a door or bridge a gap. Anar took it, and the rest dissolved. Hugo pressed a coupon into his hand, one free fortune at Oddlewind's tent.
Clawson Blink sat cross-legged on a rug among his trinkets, a canine face behind a coil of hookah smoke, and he wanted only stories. Tell him something worth an item and the item was yours. Puck told tales on Orimene's behalf and walked away with a guitar pick that came with three-quarters of an hour of backstory; for the rest he traded a signet ring out of the Delphi manor for a small rust monster statuette, and a dagger for a glass rook. The silver snuff box, lovely as it was, stayed behind. Then Puck took a pull on the hookah and grew to the size of a man, and a second lungful put him flat on the pillows in a sleep nothing could shake. From there the party carried him, and when Clawson's powder made the sleeping gnome dance, Anar tied a rope to his waist and steered.
Oddlewind's tent glowed from purple to gold at the edge of the lantern-light. Azran went first and drew a card that came up inverted — The Key — and was told a dream would bring him answers, only not the ones he wanted. Orimene slipped in next, charged only a single scaled hair on account of her new size, and was warned that a foe was hunting her and meant to have vengeance soon. The sleeping Puck was carried in by the others; he woke long enough to hear that a great responsibility was coming for him whether he felt ready or not, that his lucky numbers were 367, and that the word of the day was Bingo.
At Merryweather's, a dryad turned among her bird cages and the party left with three new friends: a blue finch named Tim who had trailed Puck since he first played his flute, a fire-feathered bird Orimene named Burb, and a black, pearl-sheened raven that took to Anar like a familiar. Orimene saw what Merryweather would not say aloud — that she loved Hugo — and flew his dinner invitation to the wine-cask he called home. Shears sounded inside, then his voice telling them he would be there. But when Merryweather thanked them and swore they were safe, blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and Anar felt the truth of the place settle on him: the people who worked this carnival were not here by choice.
Behind the trailers slept a moonstone dragon, long-haired, two small bison-things tucked in her wing. Penelope went to her like family. Paz asked after the shipment, after how close they were to clearing the debt, and breathed Orimene back into her own shape — a kindness that lasted only as long as she stayed inside the market. Penelope passed her forty gold; Paz told her to see Gigi, and to come back in the morning. Somewhere in there Anar drank his first bottle of mushroom mead and shrank until he and Penelope stood eye to eye.
The big top called them in for the main event. Puck took the trapeze, played Pip in mid-air, and threw up an illusion that read THE ONE AND ONLY EVER HARD while Orimene scattered dancing lights around him, and the crowd answered with a wave. Then an old woman walked to the center of it all and whispered, and every person heard the whisper in their own ear. Gigi conducted fireworks into animals for half an hour, thanked them all, invited anyone who needed to settle up to find her, and sank into the ground. The stamps on their hands began to burn, the letters GG rising like a brand, and Puck — watching closely — understood that the carnies all seemed to speak from a single script, as if someone spoke straight through them.
Penelope hid them with Pass Without a Trace and led them to Gigi's tent. Inside stood shelves of porcelain dolls, one for every face at the fair, and a single plush green dragon with eyes that glowed. Gigi called Penelope by an old name, Ms. Sweets, and scolded her for the late shipment, and when Penelope tried to explain a snap of Gigi's fingers raised a handprint on her cheek while the matching doll slumped. To speak against Gigi, or even to think it too loudly, cost blood; Penelope's own mouth ran red when she tried to tell the others anything true about her. Gigi pressed twenty gold on her, told her to go feed Paz, and waved them out. By the door hung a sign — all she wished was three nights of good dreams — and beneath it a jar of greenish-purple smoke. They retired to Penelope's room inside Paz's tent, and the night closed over a woman the DM would only call, quietly, a CR of 25, in layers.