Sir Captain Quackers had been smiling for six years. His beak would not stop. He smiled through the funeral of his brother. He smiled through the winter his pond froze solid. He smiled now, crouched behind a toadstool at the edge of the Fairy Ring, watching the golden winged horse tap out a rhythm on the moss. Somewhere inside that sound was the answer. He was sure of it. Something in this ring had cursed his face, and he meant to find out what. A twig snapped behind him. He did not turn. He learned that trick young. Instead he tipped his captain's hat forward and watched the treeline in the polished brass of his belt buckle. A shape moved between two birches. Red wings. Black fur. Green eyes fixed on the back of his blue and red shirt. The Crimsonwing Cat was watching him. Sir Captain Quackers's floppy shoes had left a clear trail through the wet moss. If the cat followed him home to the dock, whoever sent it would know where he slept. His investigation would end tonight. He kept smiling. He could not help it. But his webbed hands were shaking. He needed to lose the cat before the sun dropped behind the ring. He waddled out slow, humming, playing the fool. The golden horse spooked and lifted off in a clatter of red tap shoes. Good. Noise. Cover. Sir Captain Quackers cut left, away from the dock, toward the tide flats where the mud went deep and the gulls screamed loud enough to hide a duck. The cat glided after him, low and quiet between the trees. He hit the flats at a run. His floppy shoes filled with mud on the second step. He kicked them off, tucked them under one wing, and pushed on barefoot. The cat could not track scent through salt mud. He knew that from the tide book Bubbles kept above her sink. Bubbles was already on the porch of her shack when he came up the far side of the flats, still smiling, mud to his knees. She was humming that same song she always hummed, the one in the language she did not speak. She stopped when she saw his face. Or rather, she stopped when she saw what his face was doing while the rest of him shook. "Inside," she said. "Now." She pulled him through the door of the Sunny Dock Shack and shut it behind them. Through the small blue-framed window he watched the treeline across the water. A red wing flashed once between two trunks. Then nothing. The cat had lost him at the flats. Bubbles bolted the door. "Little duck," she said, wiping mud from his hat, "who did you make angry?" Sir Captain Quackers opened his beak to answer. His smile widened instead. And he understood, for the first time, that whatever had done this to his face already knew his name.