They carry on up the road until they find the first body in the furlong beyond the apple trees. It is being bothered by five or six crows. Thomas steps across the ditch into the field, stops, takes aim with the bow and sends an arrow humming across the furrows to knock one of the birds cartwheeling. The others clap their wings and take flight, off across the fields.

The body is lying face down, a substantial mound, covered in a thick crust of old snow. The man had been wearing a jack, faded red, much repaired, the elbows patched with more red cloth. Green stitches. His fingertips are eaten down to the bone. Thomas squats and studies the body without touching it. The crows have found their way in above the kidneys and the smell is strong, the sort to coat the tongue.

He can feel tears prick his eyes and he feels a sense of desolation. He stands, steps back, crosses himself, murmurs a prayer. It is short, for he intends to return to bury the body himself, properly in the churchyard, and then he finds the dead bird and pulls it from his arrow with the sole of his boot, wiping the arrowhead in the snow.

He walks slowly back to Katherine.

‘Who is it?’ she calls.

He can tell she knows. It is just that she does not want to be right.

‘Geoffrey,’ he says when he is near, and he can hear her draw breath.

‘Oh dear God,’ she says and she squeezes her eyes shut. ‘He was – Oh God.’

He almost takes her in his arms, but dares not. Instead he nods and walks past her and she follows him silently up along the road through the orchard to the little copse where they hobble the horses. Here they find the second body, leaning with his back to a tree trunk under the naked wands of the coppiced willow. He has his hands clapped around a crossbow quarrel lodged in his cheek. His fingers are swollen; the flesh is blue and mottled, streaky with dark blood. Snow caps his helmet in a point, too, and it has mixed with the blood on his livery coat to turn it rose. Thomas bends and brushes the snow away with the back of his fingers. Above the man’s heart, picked out in felt and clumsy stitches, is a badge. A raven.

They stare at it for a moment.

‘One of Riven’s.’