Foxhunt Read online

  Perhaps they were new to the title. Perhaps Orfeus would survive this easily and go back inside, and Primrose would divorce Bellan and come travel on the road with her, and fame would come all at once and not in slow, painful inches by the skin of her teeth.

  “It was a joke,” said Orfeus, “much as you are.”

  They snarled. Actually snarled. She recognised the animal on their mask now, pricked ears and snout crinkled up from bared teeth.

  “Your real name?” Orfeus said. She was pushing her luck. She always would.

  Silence a moment. Then, “Faol.”

  Orfeus grinned in disbelief, lips pulled back from her teeth. She knew at least a little old Éirish Gaelic. “That’s just wolf again—”

  But the time for talking had run out. The hunter drew a tasegun from their hip and fired it in the same motion, far too fast for Orfeus to dodge it even if she’d been keeping up her sparring practice. The stunning beam fizzed over her body and she fell lumpen to the ground.

  She lay still, eyes only able to look up at the deep blue evening sky. Faol strode into her line of vision.

  Orfeus twitched her fingers, then her toes, movement only slowly returning. It felt as if she’d been inexpertly carved from wood. She tried to move her hands but they only jerked in random twitches, no proper command gestures.

  The Wolf stopped over her and drew a knife that was a gleaming length of light. Orfeus croaked out a nothing-word, and then her words came back, her breath and her blessed words, and she said, clearly, “Energy.”

  Her Blood activated, and at the command word adrenaline flooded through her, kickstarting her body. She lurched up.

  Faol stopped and stared. “So you are Blooded.”

  Orfeus grinned and slipped into something like a kickboxing stance. “Only if you play your cards right, Wolfy—”

  Faol punched her hard in the throat and Orfeus staggered back, choking on nothing. At least that hadn’t been the clawed hand, but there was still a gauntlet.

  The Wolf’s stance shifted slightly, like they would throw another punch. Maybe another haymaker, which was an odd fighting choice for someone shorter than Orfeus, but – her throat ached – undeniably effective. Rising Tide, they were muscle and nothing else.

  Orfeus couldn’t take another hit like that. She flared out her hands in quick and complex gestures.

  Too much electricity was risky, so she did heat. Someone like the Wolf had combat instincts too good to let her get a blow in, but all she needed was a touch. She got her hand to their shoulder, and watched without pain as the tips of her fingers glowed red, then blinding white.

  Faol didn’t make a sound, but their jaw tightened. They took a step back, just one.

  Orfeus took a step back too, bracing herself, then turned and sprinted away.

  Cowardice was one word for it, but survival was the main one. Someone from the Order had trained their whole life to hunt. Orfeus had done a little bit of everything, but the driving force of her life was music and performance. She was smart enough to know to run.

  Smart, and fast, head forward and arms pumping in a sprint that would turn into a jog if she got far enough away.

  Before she’d gotten more than a street away, a bike dropped down in front of her.

  A hoverbike. She’d seldom seen a single-person transport device, wasteful as they were. Solar foil was visible, tucked in at the sides and between the coiling metal guts of the thing as though to declare that the Wild could be accused of no hypocrisy.

  Faol leapt off the bike. In their tough armour they too looked like a carefully designed machine. They didn’t say anything, but looked disgusted.

  Running: worth trying, but hadn’t worked. Orfeus braced herself. Trying to hit back would be idiotic, but she wasn’t going to lie down in the dirt again.

  She took a deep breath and swung her fist at Faol’s face. Faol stepped to the side, one easy and economical step. Orfeus stumbled past them, and felt claws biting into her back through her cloak.

  She loosened the fastening of her cloak and wriggled out of it, diving forward, rolling, coming up in a run. She turned, lifting her hands up by her chin as though to try another hit.

  Faol didn’t move. “Make this easy on yourself,” they said. Yes, they were certainly disgusted by her.

  “So you don’t know who I am after all,” Orfeus called back. Only her training let her voice carry clearly when her breath was so ragged. Her muscles sang with adrenaline.

  The Wolf swiped their claws through the air, a frustrated gesture, certainly nowhere near close enough to hit. She still tensed at that wicked gleam. “Stop fighting.”

  Orfeus bunched her shoulders, curling her hands in readiness. “I’m never going to just give up,” she said. “Not for an instant longer than I have to. Never.”

  The Wolf shrugged and prowled forward. They were a dramatic series of dark and light, pale skin and dark armour, ragged dark hair like a fringe of shadow. “It’ll happen all the same. You’re my prey.”

  “Oh, just stop with all that bullshit!”

  And Faol stopped playing.

  They moved forward faster than she could see, and as she turned her gaze to follow the movement they hit her hard in the back of the head.

  The world splintered, shattered, and put itself together spinning and sharp at the edges. Orfeus ran forward and her legs folded under her so she fell to the ground. Kicked in the knees? Her mind spun.

  Hands dug into her back again, and the Wolf wouldn’t be put off with a cloak this time. Their claws cut through her fine cream shirt and tore into her skin, and their other hand fisted in her hair and dragged her up.

  It was painful and humiliating. Orfeus jerked around, claws digging into her back, her scalp on fire, and she flared out her fingers and sent out as much electricity as she could. No time left for caution.

  Her Blood sent her a warning, which manifested as a slight tickle in the arch of her right foot. But the Wolf staggered back a step, releasing her. The energy fizzed uselessly off their armour without reaching their flesh or nerves or anything of use, but their tasegun sparked and sputtered.

  They drew it from their belt and threw it to the ground. Orfeus tensed, ready for them to draw that light-knife.

  They punched her instead, once in the throat and then twice in the stomach. She doubled over coughing and they hit her again, crisply, on the head.

  Somehow Orfeus was on the ground again, mind spinning. She dug her fingers into the dirt to ground herself. The same old familiar scents of Tinctora, plants never far away, the distant smell of water. But there was mud in her nostrils and her chest felt torn. She vomited onto the dirt.

  She waited for the boot in her ribs or the cut of the knife. Instead there was a sharp tug at her hands, and with her body this floaty and unresponsive, she just laid there and allowed it. Something cold pressed against her wrists.

  The Wolf was binding her hands.

  Something niggled at her, a persistent twitch. Orfeus lay dreamily still and allowed herself to pay attention to it. Her head ached in a way that boded trouble, and breathing made something in her feel torn. The Wolf had certainly used destructive methods. But they hadn’t yet used any lethal ones.

  The ties on her wrists felt tough but not secured yet. Orfeus sent out another burst of electricity, and at the same moment as her bonds loosened the arch of her foot gave a warning jolt of pain.

  “Yes, I know,” Orfeus told it, rolling away. She cleared her throat, because her words came out clotted, and said as clearly as she could, “Energy.”

  The Wolf growled, but it didn’t matter. Energy was in her and all through her, in the headache pounding at her temples. She jerked to her feet and was standing before she quite knew she’d managed it. If she programmed enough energy into herself, would her blood fizz and pop out of her veins? She’d have to ask Bright.

  “Stop fighting,” the Wolf said, and Orfeus sparkled them a grin and held her hands palm-up. The old method of showing y
ou were unarmed. Not anymore.

  “Or what?” she said. “You’ll kill me?”

  They said nothing. To be fair, they didn’t seem talkative in general. But the slow heaviness with which they said nothing, the pointed shape of the silence, made her hunch turn closer to certainty. It was a hell of a chance to take. But it was better than giving up.

  Orfeus took a step back, and the Wolf followed. “I’m your prey, fine,” Orfeus said. “Fine. But I’m prey you need to take in alive. Right? That’s your contract or whatever it is.”

  Faol bared their teeth. That made two sets, with the gleamingly metallic wolf-teeth that hung from their brow. “It’s not a contract. It’s honour.”

  “Gods, you’re the worst!” Orfeus blurted.

  Faol drew their knife. Orfeus remembered with a sick jolt that someone could cut without meaning to kill.

  She held up her hands and touched her fingers to her temples. The Wolf stopped short.

  They looked at her, looked at her like it was a question. More like an accusation, really.

  Orfeus grinned. This was deadly dangerous, and all in all she felt like crap, but with the Wolf’s attention on her and a card up her sleeve, she also felt like she was on stage. She was flying.

  So her voice rolled out smooth and confident, the ready entertainer. “There aren’t failsafes in my Blood,” Orfeus said. “Not really. If I say the right sequence, if I move correctly, there’s nothing to stop me sending enough heat right to my brain to fry it.” Not easily, granted. The Wolf started to grin: a grin that looked like contempt.

  They took another step forward. Orfeus stood rock-steady and smiled back. “Believe me or don’t, but it’s better than losing,” she said. “And then you will have nothing to bring back but a beautiful corpse.”

  Faol stood solid, but still. They held out their knife in front of them so the light-blade flickered. “We have means,” they said, just that. Orfeus’s skin prickled. There were plenty of ways to revive someone recently dead, if they were kept chilled. Certainly for an organisation with so much tech.

  This was too deadly a gamble.

  But who knew where this creature wanted to take her? If she stood by and let it happen, there was no telling if she could stop things later. No.

  “Can you bring me back to whoever hired you in four minutes, then?” Orfeus said. “What a clever little wolf.”

  Their eyes were narrow slits of rage. “You won’t go through with it.”

  Orfeus met their eyes dead-solid. She murmured subvocally, “Heat,” and the tips of her fingers started to warm. She clicked the fingers of her other hand to disengage her heatproofing, as her normal setup protected her from heat generated by her own Blood.

  It hurt. There was the smell of burning hair.

  Another moment, two, and Orfeus clenched her jaw against the pain. “Stop,” the Wolf said. Abrupt as something breaking. “Stop.”

  Orfeus didn’t stop. The burning wasn’t so bad yet. It just felt like when she’d singed her fingertips as a child, trying that old trick of passing them through a candle. “Stay away from me,” she said. The words came out steady, with no trace of a waver. “Leave. Go tell your client you failed, or that I died, or whatever you want. But you will leave me alone.” They’d mentioned honour. “I want your word on that.”

  The Wolf gritted their teeth, as though it were them with the heat pressing at their skull, as though they were in the least amount of danger. Endangering them hadn’t been the right way out of this. This was the right way out of this, Orfeus told herself. Her eyes swam with tears and she held her head steady.

  The Wolf snarled and wheeled away, vanishing into the shadows of the night. A moment later there was the quiet puttering croon of the hoverbike engine.

  Orfeus jerked her hand away. The night smelt of burning hair, not water, not plants.

  She waited for the space of ten seconds and then couldn’t wait any more. “Oh Rising Tide, oh Smog Sky, oh by all the Green, that hurts,” she said in a low croon. “Oh, that hurts.” She held her hand out away from her, as though she could distance it from her body. Her head ached and spun. Everything ached. “Ohh, that hurts.”

  Faol had made no promises. They left, but made no promises. Orfeus would trust nothing less from the Wolf than a promise. She limped stiffly back to the dining house fearing any second that a weight would hit into her back and bear her down.

  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.

  The woman who would found the Order, she looked around and she saw this happening, and she knew sure as certain the world would slide back to the Brink if we weren’t careful. That humans, as well as being kind and careful, are lazy and greedy creatures, and the dark days could easily be brought back again through the actions of a few. And she saw that no one was doing anything about it and no one would do anything about it. There was nothing they could do. Laws hadn’t been made to stop that kind of thing yet, because everyone thought people would just keep being good, but the storms had been so long ago that the threat seemed distant. There were only laws about treating people kindly, not what to do if folk didn’t. And she didn’t want to leave it so long that Smog Sky would send her own storms and Rising Tide sweep away the innocent along with the guilty.

  So she went after the first and worst of them, a man trying to bring back the lost age of steel towers and trees cut down for paper to pay to cut down more trees, a man trying to build a tower taller than anything else in the land. And she murdered him in his bed that night. Fierce and savage, like it was an animal that did it. And she wrote on the wall in his blood: We still remember.

  And that was the first leader of the Order of the Vengeful Wild.

  There’s more formality to them now and more they can do, and they are a needed thing, like the doctors that heal your hurts, little one. But never forget that they started same as they still are, that night in the ever-ago, all bathed in vengeance and blood.

  - An old folktale, as told by Basma of Hollyhock

  * * *

  Orfeus treated her wounds that night. First things first. She had to take care of her body, the best weapon she had.

  As she entered the house, she automatically moved to hang her cloak up on the hook. Her hand felt around
at the empty space above her back and she scowled.

  She poured a cup of water from her house’s tap and drank it down, cold and clear. She poured and drank another. She poured one more and set it aside, and then she filled the kettle and set it to boiling. As it went, she set a stool by the table and gathered what items she had.

  The house she grew up in back at Hollyhock had a better kit than this, even though her mother Maylis had been more a brewer than a proper healer. Orfeus still had respectable stores: a length of clean gauze bandage, rubbing alcohol, needle and fine thread if it got really bad, plus some shelves of dried herbs in small glass jars which had likely lost their potency.

  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.