Even as Felix bent down to wrestle another fallen branch out of the leaves, he wondered how the hell he'd got himself volunteered for firewood duty.

"[i]Bring a stack of little ones too for the oven![/i]" an obnoxious feminine voice called after him from beyond the treeline. Felix gritted his teeth and pulled the branch free, adding it to the bushel on his back, and he imagined what it might be like to shut up Midge's big mouth just for a day. It was a sweet freedom he could only dream of.

Not so far behind him, the circus was gearing up for another slow night -- shouts called out across the clearing, posts were hammered into the ground, someone was sawing new boards for a sign that had broken the night before when a drunk kid had stumbled into it. The twins were practicing their duet in painful disharmony; the bearded lady was in an uproar catfight with the fortune teller again. Slams, bangs, whizzes and crashes echoed into the forest. Quiet was a luxury none of them had experienced in years. Felix grabbed a handful of sticks and flung them onto the pile.

A voice, coming from the opposite direction, caught his ear. He stopped, and he stood up slowly, and he listened until he heard it again. He shifted the wood on his back. "Hello?" He craned his neck and walked deeper into the woods, searching between the trees for the source of the voice, but all he could see was bark and weeds and rocks. The clanking and sawing and shouting faded behind him, and he jumped a little creek and clambered up a steep sandy incline, losing a few branches from his stack along the way.

By the time he reached the top, his shirt was spattered with mud and his boots and trousers had been soaked to the knee. He straightened his porkpie hat and glanced around him -- and he spotted a girl moving there between the trees.

"Oy!" he called, and he waved a hand over his head. He squinted in the sunlight and shaded his eyes with a hand -- was that a tail? He was sure of it, when she got closer. She was dressed like an acrobat, too, though he wasn't sure where she'd got that sort of material.

"Hey, you're one of the new sideshow girls, right?" He offered her a friendly smile, knowing the new ones were always skittish when they first arrived. "Simon brought you? Come on, you're a little turned around, the tents are back this way."