Excerpt from “YOUNG HUNTING”

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What blood is that on thy coat lap,
Son Davie, son Davie?
What blood is that on thy coat lap?
And the truth come tell to me.

 From Child Ballad #13, “Edward”

In the deep shadow of the midnight woods, across icy ground covered by freshly falling snow, leaving a trail of blood no one but the owls would see, Diverus ran as if he could outpace the memory of his misdeed. His dreadlocks tumbled loose about his shoulders and there was a rushing sound in his ears like the water flowing over the river of the dead. What he had done there would be no taking back.

Crashing through the frozen undergrowth and scrambling over a fallen tree, Diverus reached the edge of the forest. Past the ruined stone wall and the slender willow trees lay the clearing in which Arrastra Commune lay. 

A dusting of frozen crystals scattered through the sky like some kind of omen. It never snowed anymore in the Lake District. After years of drought and famine, heat and monsoons, this apparent rupture to the usual order signaled change was coming. From his current vantage, Diverus could just make out the rusting iron structures that marked the edge of the old sculpture garden. The decaying figures had been repositioned to indicate the location of hidden tripwires and noisemakers that acted as an early alarm system for intruders. Diverus knew the path so well he could almost navigate it with eyes closed.

As he paused to catch his breath, Diverus’s younger brother, Spens, caught up to him. Diverus couldn’t bear to be near him right now, not after what he’d done. He started forward through the sculpture garden in an attempt to get away, but with Spens was at his side, it was impossible to escape the weight of his wrongdoing.

Diverus stopped just short of the door to their dwelling, which was one chalet in a cluster of others. The windows of the other homes were dark and silent, but he could see the glow of the hearth fire burning through his window. Their mother Imani must have stayed up waiting for them. Diverus couldn’t move.

Spens pressed on, throwing open the front door. He became a silhouette against the warm light inside—tall and scrawny, taller than Diverus even though at thirteen he was two years younger. Diverus tried to reconcile this scene with many others like it, but though it looked the same, it no longer fit. Those scenes belonged to another world. His reality had been sundered once more. 

Born in the year of the Collapse, Diverus’s life marked the transition that cleaved the Plastic Age of plenty from the famine and chaos of the Interregnum. About the Collapse itself, he had mostly heard platitudes. “It was the culmination of the years we turned our most terrible weapons against ourselves,” his father had said. Diverus remembered, too, his father telling him that the Civil War had been ended by something or someone called “the Faceless” whose “wyrm” had “devoured the web” and caused the nationwide blackout and ensuing suspension of large-scale military maneuvers. The years that followed were marked by disorder, plague, famine, and national isolation. The Plastic Age had an aura of mystery to it, and almost everyone in Arrastra had a contradictory story about what it had been like. But no matter how they described the past, whether in terms of condemnation or wistfulness, they all seemed to agree on one thing: when Diverus was born, a better world had ended. This gave Diverus the sense of having somehow brought about the wrong world—the one no one wanted.

Diverus’s transition to adolescence had been similarly marked by division. The Duke of Manchester had loomed over Diverus’s childhood with all the menace of a demon. He was the reason their family had been forced to flee their home in Manchester. With Great Britain—or Albion, as many now preferred to call it—falling further into dissolution and violence, they had been forced to leave the city, but fortunately Diverus’s parents had known about Arrastra. For a little more than four years, Diverus and his family had lived in the old artists’ commune happily enough, but now that time, too, was coming to an end; disrupted once again by the Duke and his Loyalist army. 

Diverus could hear Spens crying to their mother. He arrived at the door just in time for his mother to whirl on him. She was pressing Spens to her bosom like he was still just a baby, and he was acting like it—weeping into the fabric of her faded whappe dress. Diverus would have done the same if he could, but he didn’t dare approach his mother now. He couldn’t ask her to love him after this.