Etxe is a towering, narrow skeleton whose joints click like loose tuning pegs when he walks. His ivory bones have a warm amber sheen from years of oil and careful polishing, and a narrow black ribbon is tied around his jaw as if it were a gentleman's cravat. He moves with a jaunty, forward-tilting stride, then stops so abruptly that his coat keeps swaying after him. The bones of his fingers are long and clean, but he wears a tiny child's knitted mitten on one thumb, darning it whenever it snags.

Etxe is exuberant when a room is frightened and solemn when a room expects solemnity. He jokes freely about his own condition, yet becomes fiercely protective when others are mocked. He is patient with the confused and impatient with the comfortable, though he privately envies people who can simply go home.

Etxe was once a traveling bone-carver's son who learned music from the ferry crews on the high lake roads. He became a celebrated wedding fiddler, partly because he remembered every guest's name and partly because he could make even a bitter family dance together. During the winter famine at Kest, a floodgate failed while the town's wealthy millers argued over whose grain should be saved. Etxe played on the mill roof to guide people through the rising fog, then drowned while holding a rope for the last children to cross. A wandering spirit-bard found his body days later and returned him to motion, but not to life. Etxe kept the mitten one rescued child had pressed into his hand. That child, now the aging midwife Tinka, still sends him letters he pretends not to treasure. He has spent decades collecting the names of those lost in the flood, but lately the river has begun giving those names back in the voices of the dead. He suspects the old mill's sealed undercroft is opening again.