He went back to the field and climbed the shallow bank—his footsteps lost in a morass of many prints now—and walked toward the spot where the tidy rows of grain ended in a flattened fan. Just before he reached it, he saw the darker stains in the dark earth, barely visible now but clear enough if someone searched for them. Here she’d died, bleeding into the soil, and here she’d been abandoned.

He knelt there in the trampled dust and stared at the earth, trying to reach out to the mind of the woman who had lain here. Hamish stirred restlessly, but Rutledge ignored him.

A terrified woman. Coming face to face with a man bent on vengeance, knowing she was going to die—knowing her children were already dead—or soon would be—

Did she beg? Make promises? Was there anything she had left that Mowbray wanted, besides her life? Or was death an end for her to terror and horror—the doorway into the silence where her children had gone before her?

Had she hidden them and protected them with her own Wood? Knowing that once she was dead—and couldn’t be made to tell—they’d be safe? Buying time while they reached some kind of safety.

Was that why he’d beaten her face so savagely? Trying to force the truth from her, trying to make her give him what he believed was his, his flesh and blood?

But the ground here was silent. And Rutledge, listening for answers in his own mind, seeking something real and deeply felt that could show him the way, could hear nothing. Whatever had brought this woman to the edge of an abyss, whatever emotions had roiled the air and left grisly traces on the ground were still her secret.

In the end he stood up and shook his head, unable to reach what had happened here. My fault? he wondered, and Hamish said it was.

What about Mowbray’s point of view? Take the living man, instead of the dead woman, and delve into his feelings.

He’d killed her here—and abandoned her here.

Why? Why not pull the body into the rows of grain, where only the field mice and crows would spot it so soon? Why leave it close to the road, where the farmer, coming to look over his crops, might stumble across it and raise the alarm?

“Because,” Hamish answered him, “the man was no’ thinking with cold logic. He was distracted and angry and vengeful.”

“Yes,” Rutledge agreed aloud. “He wanted her dead, he didn’t care whether he’d be caught or not. They found him, after all, asleep under a tree.”