Orfeus didn’t sleep well in unknown surroundings and she didn’t sleep much at the best of times. She sat motionless with her eyes closed, thinking as little as she could.

After a while her various aches and pains came back to her, insisting on making themselves heard. Orfeus stretched and opened her eyes. She cast a cocky grin at Rivasoa, who sat across from her and stared steadily as though she hadn’t looked away this whole time. As though Orfeus was an interesting subject to examine. Well, if the Elder was uncomfortable with her using Blood, that was a button she could push.

“Don’t you need sleep too?” Orfeus said. She stretched again, making a show of it, and then stretched out each of her fingers, waggling them.

“I’m not fully what you would call ‘human’,” Rivasoa said calmly.

Orfeus let her hands drop to her sides. “None of you are human,” she said. There were reasons she hadn’t visited Eldergrove before this, quite aside from it being invitation-only. She had no wish to walk through a city of holier-than-thou immortals, barely tethered to the humans they’d once been.

Rivasoa gave a slow blink. Orfeus wondered if she even needed to blink, with those strange eyes. “Does not our magic run through your blood?”

“True,” Orfeus said, and she held her fingers up to her head and twisted them in the motion that meant Heal.

Blood didn’t automatically heal its bearer. That could lead to all kinds of unpleasantness: wounds sealing shut with stingers or metal still inside them, earrings fusing into flesh, some complicated business with regards to haircuts. Changes to the body might be rejected, like surgery or skin grafts for wounds larger than Blood could heal on its own, or antibodies might run wild and hot as a fever and reject everything.

So it needed activation. After that, though, the little bits of Blood got busy, fixing and mending. Orfeus knew her skin had a slight glow where her Blood was focused on the burns, and she smiled serenely at Rivasoa.

Rivasoa produced a small book and stylus from her robes and began to write, focusing on her task and not on Orfeus. Orfeus shrugged. Blood still buzzing at her temple, she held her hand out over her back to signal that those cuts too should be healed.

Rivasoa said, stilted and formal, “Must you do this while I’m here?”

Orfeus cocked her head. “I could take a different cabin,” she said and smiled. “Of course, then you couldn’t keep an eye on me.”

Rivasoa looked at her steadily, then looked back down at her book. She didn’t deny that was what she was doing or a part of it, perhaps why the Elders had felt the need to assign Orfeus an escort at all. Orfeus grinned. Excessive honesty wasn’t a trait she could relate to, but it might be useful somewhere down the line.