She’d just been playing those notes to test the crowd, to see whether they’d laugh her away or jeer her into putting away the guitar, or whether she could play a song or two for this group of people who had become not-really-friends. But she looked up to rapt faces. Everyone, even the Wolf. Boarhound lowered ver tankard to gawp.

It made something in her heart curl and sting, a strange pang of sympathy. Always out on the hunt or up here all grim and colourless: no chance to drop in at a wayhouse to experience even an amateur level of talent, let alone a proper show.

She’d just wanted to give a casual performance and she would, they deserved that, but she shifted her posture, straightening her back to have the full use of her lungs.

She sang the basic songs, all her usual repertoire. The ones she’d painstakingly reconstructed from whatever scraps Eldergrove would allow her of the songs that used to exist, often just lyrics, a bare suggestion. A few minutes of a scraped-together version of “Tam Lin.” “Scarborough Fair,” which had the same melody it had millennia ago, as far as she knew. Many things persisted.

She followed with some rowdier songs to make them sing along, and then eased out into one of her first ballads:

“I remember what my mother told me

There were giants on this green earth

Towering spires and spreading cities

Living now only in verse

Our world is smaller, wiser

We know better than the folk from long ago

Though I’d love a world that’s wider

Honoured Earth needs room to grow …”

She finished off. Silence in the room. Orfeus stood up and flourished her most ridiculous bow, and that broke the silence: they laughed, and applauded her, and Hyena who had grown all familiar grabbed her shoulder and jostled her and scolded her. “Why haven’t you sung for us before?” Hyena said, rowdy. “You have to do this every night. Gotta do something, when you can’t fight like the best of us yet!”

Orfeus appreciated that yet. She appreciated the applause, sitting down with her cheeks flushed hot: a tiny crowd, but it mattered more when the people mattered to her, and Green help her but they did. It had been a long time since she played, let alone played as performance. She appreciated the companionship and the comfort. Even Faol was rapt, as she played. Even Luga. He had come in to watch, and now he departed, but she had seen them there.

She could be herself here, even if she was changed. She could claw herself into being valued, even if that shouldn’t matter as much as it did.