He wandered to the edge of town as the first light was just coming up beyond the ridge. Starlings trembled in a slush of leaves by the roadside. Far behind him now a cradle of love swayed almost imperceptibly in a bower of deep deep green, and the morning star hung from a rusty nail. His lover awoke, but he was not there. Slowly she opened her lovely brown eyes, and in the soft light her amber skin looked as smooth as a riverstone. She reached an arm out, but he was not there to receive it.
He met the hunters later on a dusty spit of land, as the noonday demon was sharpening his implements. He tried to marshal his thoughts into some order, but he was transifixed by the hunters and their talk of blood. Their faces were hard and inscrutable and their clothes smelled of woodsmoke. A column of crows rose in the distance like black leaves. He turned his thoughts to love and faith and diligence, but they were becoming half-ideas now, disappearing like vapour.
The hunters gathered in a knot on the road with their guns steepling their shoulders. They talked quietly among themselves and after a short while they turned off the road and began to walk north across the meadowgrass, toward the edge of the wood. One of them turned back to him, smiled like a conspirator and called for him to come. His heart felt like a fist of cold ash in his chest. Blond dust eddied around his pantlegs. He stood there imagining rivulets of blood moving across young flesh, and right near the shell of his ear he swore he heard the sound of his lover’s sharp intake of breath. He closed his eyes and took a step forward. And then another.
