Yehuda Leib’s eyes were turned skyward nearly the whole way, and he did not have the presence of mind to take notice when the gravestones first began to loom up between the trees. It was only when he put his foot through what felt like a basket of brittle sticks that he looked down.

He had stepped, up to the knee, into an ancient gray rib cage.

Suddenly Yehuda Leib was aware: the stones were all around him, their names and dates and remembrances worn away by time and weather. Some were choked in dormant creepers, some covered over entirely with snow.

But Yehuda Leib could not afford to stop.

The crow flew onward, and Yehuda Leib pursued.

Slowly, the balance began to shift, the trees falling off, the stones growing thicker. One of the last trees Yehuda Leib passed beneath was an ancient, knobbled, reaching oak, bare of leaves, that spread its boughs and fingers wide across the thinning forest. Even before he was beneath its branches, Yehuda Leib knew there was something odd about it: he could hear its long, twiggy extremities clacking against one another in the breeze, and they were not of wood—they were of bone.

Yehuda Leib swallowed hard. Only hours ago, he would have scoffed at talk of a tree of bone.

But he would have scoffed at the notion that he would meet his father, too, and stand above him as his lifeblood trickled out into the snow.

And yet beneath him his father had lain, and above him stood the tree of bone.

It seemed to matter very little whether or not he was willing to believe it.

On the crow flew, and Yehuda Leib followed after. The trees gave way to open fields, hills, valleys full of gravestones, and the fall of snow grew thicker and thicker, until all Yehuda Leib could see in the swirling obscurity was the tiny ball of light, lodged far above in the throat of the crow.

And then—just when the world seemed to be swallowed in snow and darkness—shapes loomed up from the gloom.

And they were close.

Yehuda Leib darted back, taking cover behind a low crypt wall.

There were so many that the column seemed endless—soldiers upon soldiers upon soldiers, marching wearily through the night. Their uniforms were soiled and torn, bloody, mismatched. Some were missing things—fingers, hands, even whole legs. Others had been slashed open with sabers or peppered with grapeshot. Yehuda Leib saw one soldier whose belly had been blasted clean through with a cannonball, and still he slogged forward through the snow.

This was no ordinary army.

For some time, Yehuda Leib crouched in the snow, watching the Army of the Dead go by. Their numbers never dwindled, and the rhythmic marching of their feet seemed to match the beating of his heart.

This was no coincidence.