The glare subsided, though Orfeus couldn’t read the expression that replaced it. Faol was easiest to read when he scowled. He sighed and said, “You could trust those above you.” Orfeus opened her mouth, outraged, and Faol hastened on, even walking slightly faster, “Someone broke hospitality code. In a wayhouse.”

Orfeus tilted her head. “Oh,” she said, startled.

“People barely need to owe us a favour to call on us, when it’s for this kind of crime.” He shook his head, and he was certainly easy to read now, grim and glowering. “Folk should know better.”

The Wolf strode through the forest like everything would give way before her, and everything did. Orfeus was getting tired of having to struggle to keep up. “How did they break hospitality?”

“He brought no gifts to the house, though he was rich enough,” Faol said. Her eyes glinted like a knife in the bottom of a pit. “I think he took more than was offered. Took from the daughter of the house.”

Orfeus’s stomach twisted unpleasantly. “Ah.”

No world was perfect, not even with all the best people making their best efforts. Orfeus was tall and strong and quick, and did not intimidate easily. Still, she had taken lessons in how to defend herself, how to turn aside an attacker or inflict enough harm she could run. It was only wise. Rules were there to protect you, but rules could still fail.

And when rules failed there was the Wild, hungry and ravenous. Vengeful. When Orfeus looked at Faolan, she wasn’t sure whether she saw a demon or an avenging angel, a creature armed with swords of light or some terrible monster made of dust and blood and rage.

And she was here too. If people saw, if anyone told stories of this. She was one of them too now: fox-masked and mysterious, here for bloody work and then gone.

A broad shelled path led up through the gardens to the house, and Faol stopped at the base of the hill, looking up. She shook her head and led them round the back, then frowned up: there was a decent stretch of hill before the back windows, ground with no cover.

He turned to Orfeus. “Hide us.”

Orfeus opened her mouth, blinked, frowned down at her fingers. “Ah…”

Faolan’s eyes dug into her like a challenge. “You said you could.”

“Yes,” Orfeus said. She had said that. Mostly she said whatever was needed to get her through the moment, but maybe she could sustain this lie. Necessity was the mother of invention. “I can, but I’m mostly used to…only needing to hide myself, not other people. I can’t guarantee it’ll go as planned.”

Faolan shrugged and turned, eyes fixed on the hill, legs tensed, ready to move. “Try.”

Orfeus drew in a deep breath. She rolled her shoulders and stretched her arms, shaking out her fingers.