Kepi hadn’t been much help. Aside from naming this general area, there seemed to be no particular place that the raven people were seen.

They wandered among the ramshackle shanties for the rest of the morning, attracting little attention from the locals. There wasn’t any formal market that they could see, just people crying their meager wares in the streets or offering what little they had from doorways.

Casual inquiry about the raven folk got them either blank looks or shrugged shoulders. The raven people came and went as they pleased, and nobody knew where any of them lived or where they’d come from, but anyone who had seen them put them down as mad for their silly trades.

Nevertheless, Seregil and Alec soon came across a few people stricken with the sleeping death. Two were lying in the open—one a boy of fourteen or so, and the other an old woman—left to die alone. No one would admit to knowing anything about them. Seregil sensed that it hurt Alec to just walk away, but there was little they could do for them here.

The morning was nearly gone when they passed an open-fronted lean-to. Inside, an old woman was wailing over a little boy lying on a pallet of rags.

“What ails him, old mother?” Seregil asked, approaching slowly so as not to alarm her.

“Dead of the sleeping sickness,” she wept. “The last of all my kin! No drysian would come.”

“Have you lost any others to the sickness?”

“His sister died yesterday. What am I to do?”

Seregil knelt beside her and looked down at the child. He had hair the color of Alec’s, and a lock of it had been cut to the left of his face. “Did he and his sister trade with the raven folk, old mother?”

“With the what?” The old woman stared up at him with red-rimmed eyes.

“Beggars making odd trades? Did your grandchildren trade with them?”

“I don’t know what yer talking about! Just leave me alone.”

“Here now, don’t be badgering her about such things!” a fat man called from his own hovel across the path. Heaving himself up from the crate he’d been sitting on, he stumped over to join them. “Can’t you see she’s mourning? Leave her be with your foolish questions!” the man growled, aiming a kick at Seregil.

Seregil grunted in pain and sprang to his feet. “Apologies to you both. Maker’s Mercy, old mother, and the Old Sailor’s peace.”

* * *

Frustrated and hungry, they sat on the end of a broken-down wagon with the bread and sausage they’d brought, not wanting to chance eating anything they’d find here.

“It’s like looking for one particular frog in Blackwater Marsh,” Alec muttered. “We’ve got trades with no deaths and deaths with no trades, and no sign of any raven people. It’s almost three days now, for Myrhichia.”