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caravan—his parents’ bed. Ettie’s was too close and besides…Rowan gave himself a mental shake, but the thought persisted. If she was here—and he couldn’t imagine how or why she could be, but if she was—well, he wasn’t about to let anybody else sleep in her bed. If that was crazy, so be it.
    â€œIt’s really cold down here.”
    Rowan briefly reconsidered giving Aydin Ettie’s bunk, or moving the stove onto the floor closer to the beds but rejected both ideas.
    â€œGood thing you have a big dog,” he said.
    And, as if he understood, the great beast heaved himself from the floor, padded down the caravan and flopped sideways across the blanket Aydin had just laid down for a mattress.
    â€œHis name is K’waaf.” A snort of derisive amusement. “But in keeping with local tradition in the prosperous land of Prosper, I call him Wolf.”
    ROWAN SLEPT POORLY and rose early, tired of lying in his hard bunk thinking—or trying not to think—about Ettie. He would buy a mattress with the money he had found, emergency or not, he thought. He was too young to feel so stiff each morning.
    He stuck his nose experimentally into the gray dawn. It was damp and misty, with a bank of cloud lowering over the town. A rainy day to come, he guessed, and poor prospects for playing or traveling. The market square was deserted in the half-light, the streets silent but for the occasional banging of a shutter or door and a burst of raucous shrieking of crows from—Rowan craned his neck, following the sound—maybe the bell tower? Sure enough, a flapping black form rose from the structure in a swell of sound, as though ejected by the sheer force of its neighbors’ cawing. It settled on the pinnacle, only to be jostled off by a second crow. “Doing their best to scare the sun back under the world,” his father used to complain.
    That was about ravens, not crows, he reminded himself, and then the memory was back, live and present and crushing in its loneliness. It was a family story, one they used to laugh about together, and Rowan could not imagine how he would ever laugh about it again. He had been nine or ten. Still using the old button box, and just starting to join his parents for selected tunes or easy engagements. They had traveled in the caravan to the calving festival in Grassy Creek, and arrived late to find a very crowded camp area surrounding the festival grounds. His mother had been worried. “We might have to stay off the grounds,” she said. She liked the caravan easily accessible for meals, and his father liked it close by so he could keep an eye out for thieves. Then his father had pointed triumphantly to a lovely big site under an ancient beech tree. There was room for four caravans there at least, and they hurried to claim the shady area closest to the trunk.
    It wasn’t until the next morning, when the ravens let loose a dawn chorus from the top branches of the tree loud enough to wake the dead, that the family understood why no one had joined them in their prime camping spot. “Like birds, do you?” an old man—a rope seller, Rowan found out later—had asked them with a wink and a broad grin as they were setting up. Each morning, as the late nights piled up, the ravens became harder to endure until finally the dawn broke when Rowan’s father leaped out of bed and started yelling back at them in a crude but passable imitation of their exuberant, ear-splitting calls. Soon Rowan and Ettie were shrieking and giggling, flapping from one bunk to another in awkward leaps.
    Rowan smiled, remembering. When he realized he was smiling, he felt guilty. He would never be able to tease his father about those birds again—and with that realization, the grief came again and broke over him like a wave.
    â€œWhy don’t you just shut up,” he muttered, glaring at the bell tower.
    He needed breakfast. Good thing