The most pressing concern was the cuts on her back. She tugged off her billowy white shirt, wincing as it tugged at her wounds, and laid the shirt optimistically on a stool in case it could be salvaged later.

Some angling with a mirror showed that the cuts were quite deep but not long, and not bleeding too badly. Orfeus washed her hands in soap and hot water. Then she dabbed her back out with a cloth as daintily as she could with one hand, mirror held in the other. As far as she could tell, the wounds were clean. The only contamination was some threads from her shirt that she set her jaw and did her best to pick out.

The cuts would have been messier if they were from a serrated blade or anything with a jagged edge, she thought. In the moment, it had been hard to tell, but if the Wolf’s claws were sharplight too, that accounted for the cleanness of the wounds.

She rinsed her wounds clean with water, then rinsed them again with alcohol, then wrapped the bandage around her shoulder as evenly as she could. The cuts needed stitches, but her Blood would heal most of this, once it renewed. She could always fix the rest at Farflung. Her hormone schedule meant going to her friends there at least four times a year, but it was hard making excuses to see them otherwise. There was still another week before her next visit was due, which she resented bitterly. She could use the company.

Bitterly. The bite of pain was distracting, but she had something for pain. Orfeus fetched her glass jar of dried willow bark.

Chewing at the pungent bark, she saw to her other wounds with tiger balm for her budding bruises–she was out of arnica. Off the top of her head, she had no idea how to test for broken ribs, so she’d just take it easy until she could get them seen to.

Orfeus fetched her potted aloe. She sponged out her burns as carefully as she could. Should run them under water, she thought, but her hair would get in the way, so she soaked a cloth with chilly water and held that to her head instead, stirring her fingers restlessly in the air.

She wanted very much to go shake some answers out of the world as to why a bounty hunter had been sent after her, and she also wanted very much to lie down and sleep for the next eight hours, and she couldn’t do either of those things.

Orfeus threw the cloth on to the table and broke a leaf off the aloe. “Sorry,” she said to it. Perhaps she’d be able to find it some fertiliser next trading-day. She cracked the leaf, and smoothed the gel into the reddened skin by her hairline. The burning eased somewhat.