As they left, Hawkwood took one last glance over his shoulder. A year or two and the ruin would be impossible to spot, even in the light of day. Perhaps that was how it should be. It was from the surrounding timber that the materials to make the cabin had been hewed, so it seemed only fitting that the forest should reclaim what had been taken now that the occupants had departed.

It turned out that the occupants had not travelled far. In a patch of moonlight less than thirty paces from the ruin, dwarfed by the trees looming above them, stood two simple wooden crosses. Canted and choked by weeds, they too would soon disappear, absorbed by the woodland as if they had never existed.

A memory of two other small wooden crosses, erected in the shadow of a spreading oak tree, flashed into Hawkwood’s mind. Were they still standing, he wondered, or had the forest moved in to claim them, too? It was too dark to see if these forgotten markers carried inscriptions. Had the people who’d dwelled here been buried in haste as well? Had there been anyone to speak over them? Though, in the grand scheme of things, what difference did it make? It wasn’t how you died that mattered; it was how you lived. And in the end didn’t Nature always have the last word, anyway?

“Matthew?” Lawrence enquired softly.

Hawkwood, half lost in thought, turned.

“Are you all right?”

As his mind returned to the present, Hawkwood nodded. “I’m fine.”

Lawrence peered at him, unconvinced.

At that moment, Hawkwood felt something cold alight upon his cheek. He glanced up. The air was filled with tiny white flakes. They were floating down through the trees in eerie, spectral silence. He felt the caress again, first upon his brow and then his eyelid. He blinked it away.

The snow had come.

“Christ in Heaven! Four men dead! And that’s not counting Greenbush! Who the hell are these bastards? They’re going through our boys like a two-man army!”

Colonel Cromwell Pearce was fuming.

While Major Quade was thinking feverishly.

The sick in the camp were dying at an increasing rate. Because of that, it had become impractical to conduct individual interments. It was customary, therefore, to bury collectively at first light the bodies of those men who’d died during the night, while the poor souls who’d expired during the day were laid to rest a couple of hours after dusk. It had also become the practice to store the bodies in one of the huts until the allotted times and from there to transport them in numbers to the burial ground in the backs of wagons.