‘That’s a great pity,’ Corncrake grinned. ‘For I dream at night of you taking me. On your back, I mean from behind. I like it like that. And you, miss?’

‘You arsehole of a cripple!’ Lucienne yelled. ‘You stinking old goat! You—’

She broke off, seeing the faces of all the invalids sitting on the wagon suddenly covered in a deathlike pallor.

‘Damn,’ sobbed one of them. ‘And we were so close to home…’

‘We’re done for,’ said Corncrake quietly and utterly without emotion. Simply stating the fact.

And they said–the thought flashed through Jarre’s head–that there weren’t any more Squirrels. That they’d all been killed. That the elven question, as they said, had been solved.

There were six horsemen. But after a closer look it turned out there were six horses, but eight riders. Two of the steeds were carrying a pair of riders. All the horses were treading stiffly and out of rhythm, their heads drooping. They looked miserable.

Lucienne gasped loudly.

The elves came closer. They looked even worse than the horses.

Nothing remained of their pride, of their hard-earned, supercilious, charismatic otherness. Their clothing–usually even on guerrillas from the commando units smart and beautiful–was dirty, torn and stained. Their hair–their pride and joy–was dishevelled, matted with sticky filth and clotted blood. Their large eyes, usually vain and lacking in any expression, were now abysses of panic and despair.

Nothing remained of their otherness. Death, terror, hunger and homelessness had made them become ordinary. Very ordinary.

They had even stopped being frightening.

For a moment Jarre thought they would pass them, would simply cross the road and disappear into the forest on the other side, not gracing the wagon or its passengers with even a glance. That all that would remain of them would be that utterly non-elven, unpleasant, foul smell, a smell that Jarre knew only too well from the field hospitals–the smell of misery, urine, dirt and festering wounds.

They passed them without looking.

But not all of them.

An elf woman with long, dark hair caked together with congealed blood stopped her horse right beside the wagon. She sat in the saddle leaning over awkwardly, protecting an arm in a blood-soaked sling around which flies buzzed and swarmed.

‘Toruviel,’ said one of the elves, turning around. ‘En’ca digne, luned.’

Lucienne instantly realised, understood, what it was about. She understood what the elf woman was looking at. The peasant girl had been familiar from childhood with the blue-grey, swollen spectre, the apparition of famine, lurking around the corner of her cottage. So she reacted instinctively and unerringly. She held out the bread towards the elf woman.

‘En’ca digne, Toruviel,’ repeated the elf. He was the only one of the entire commando unit to have the silver lightning bolts of the Vrihedd Brigade on the torn sleeve of his dust-covered jacket.