Nothing lurched out at her, but her muscles were wound tight. Her Blood wouldn’t heal her without permission, and it certainly wouldn’t have enough power to heal her quite yet. She wasn’t sure why she limped. It felt like she’d pulled a tendon sometime in her run, or been kicked without noticing. The other hurts she was all too familiar with: in her mind’s eye she tracked every punch, even the ones she hadn’t been able to see, reliving them over and over again. The Wolf was formidable. No one had ever been so determined to hurt her before.

Orfeus winced as she passed her fallen flowers, crushed on the ground.

When she made it to the dining house, Primrose was long gone. Orfeus looked through the whole place twice, just to make sure, then told the servers they could eat the chicken if they wanted it.

She made her way home along her favourite path, lined with trees. It was hard to choose the worst thing, any one pain that hurt worse than the rest. Most of her injuries were nothing compared to the gnawing bite of curiosity that would have to wait to be satisfied.

The predominant emotion in the roiling mess of them in her head, held in perfect alignment with the memory of the Wolf’s disgust when she ran, was relief: relief she’d directed the heat at the side of her head where her hair was long. The inevitable blisters would be harder to see.

Chapter Two

Three hundred years ago, the Order was founded.

Five hundred years before that, we stepped back from the Brink, and we the world said no, and we vowed to do better, and we did better and treated each other and the world kinder. But three hundred years ago, people began to forget. They began once more to burn fires, as if to sicken the air with smoke again, to awaken Smog Sky and set us all to choking. They took greedily, more than their share, and cut more trees than they planted.