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  She settled back and gave Rivasoa a dazzling smile. Rivasoa blinked once, slowly, and in that moment Orfeus felt a pang of unease. Woven through the deep brown of the woman’s irises were threads of silver and gold, and her pupils shifted strangely. Not a normal eye.

  Rivasoa turned to look out the window, though little could be made out but colour and blur. Orfeus wasn’t one to be deterred that easily. “Please, correct me if I’m mistaken,” Orfeus said, “I defer to your knowledge, but I feel you might have some slight dislike of me.”

  Rivasoa turned her head slowly and looked at her. “Yes,” she said.

  At least she didn’t waste time. Orfeus could respect that. She leaned forward as much as the belt would allow her, rested her chin on her hand, tilted her head sideways and batted her eyelashes. “Want to tell me why?”

  “I disapprove of you,” Rivasoa said without any notable inflection.

  Orfeus leaned back and stretched her arms out over the back of the seat, though her back cried out in pain at the motion. “Goodness. I may need to ask you to avert your eyes that I may weep.” Rivasoa might be able to record with those eyes, sound or stills or video, and that was a deeply disconcerting thought much as Orfeus normally loved to be recorded. “I appreciate that you came to get me anyway. It shows an open-mindedness I treasure in my associates.”

  Rivasoa moved back a little in her seat, grimacing, her expression suggesting that she didn’t like being called an ‘associate.’ “We do not always choose our assignments,” she said. She looked out the window once more, though perhaps not for avoidance this time. “It has been a long time since I left the grove.”

  Orfeus clicked her tongue. “My condolences,” she said cheerfully.

  Nattering had worked. Rivasoa didn’t seem terribly reserved in the first place. She turned in her seat, fixed her gaze on Orfeus, and burst out, “Why would the Blood be graced on someone so … unworthy?”

  Orfeus lifted her brows again, and grinned broad and disbelieving. “You come on very strong, Madame Rivasoa. Are you sure you’re not secretly in love with me?”

  “Very sure,” Rivasoa said, with firmness. She added like a less important addendum, “And I do not have secrets.”

  Orfeus wriggled back in her seat, getting comfortable like Splodge settling into a box. “Oh, everyone has secrets.”

  If people disliked Orfeus for mere unchangeable traits about her, her general policy was to irritate them as frequently and cheerfully as possible, so that at least she got some entertainment out of it. Rivasoa didn’t snap at her yet, or twitch, or shout or sigh. It was almost like she wasn’t disapproving as much as honestly concerned that someone like Orfeus had Blood.

  It made Orfeus feel uncomfortable, like she was paying for mistakes she hadn’t even made yet.

  “Not in Eldergrove,” Rivasoa said softly. “All is illuminated there.” Those metallic eyes fixed on Orfeus.

  Orfeus smiled sunnily through her pang of misgiving.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes to pretend to sleep. Quartertrains were faster than thought, but this would be a long journey all the same.

  Chapter Three

  Eldergrove: the perfect balance of nature and technology. Of colour and light. Height and depths. Everything that is worth knowing has been preserved in Eldergrove, and the long lives of our people have made us gracious and wise, considerate to those who do not choose such blessings. We are the caretakers and custodians of the old world, but we have learned from their mistakes. The forest city will never fall. Each day we step further and further from the Brink. In the autumn the birch trees cover the streets in leaves like gold foil …

  There is nowhere in the world like home. Already I miss it dearly.

  - From the journal of Rivasoa

  * * *

  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.

  Muscles knit back together and skin began to reform. Orfeus stretched out her fingers to halt her Blood. She felt at the skin of her temple, which had been sped to maybe a week’s worth of healing: the first, papery layer of healed skin brushed off at her touch, and the skin underneath was new and soft but not painful. She stretched, angling her back. The cuts tugged, restricting her movement, but they didn’t bleed. She had the beginnings of scars. Perhaps she could manage to make scars glamorous.

  Breathing still hurt. It at least hurt less. She wasn’t going to risk using her Blood to magically fix whatever was damaged, not when a broken rib would then be stuck forever broken, bone fragments woven into new muscle. Blood on its own wasn’t intelligent, and Orfeus was not a doctor.

  “May I play?” she inquired, to be annoying. Her guitar was safest in the hatch up above, not here where any sudden lurch might jar it from her hands.

  Rivasoa folded her hands in her lap. “In the grove, we find much benefit from quiet contemplation.”

  Orfeus grinned. “I’d rather contemplate noise.”

  Rivasoa pointedly flipped a page of her smooth, small book. Her hands were large and capable, but she held the stylus careful and dextrous as a surgeon held a knife.

  The world whirled past their windows. Green and black, and then, abruptly, more colour. Orfeus shifted to the window, loosening her belt as she craned forward to stare. The train slowed as it passed through the city, if it was a city.

  Tall build
ings bustled with greenery, trees climbing up the sides and spreading out from square gardens on tower-tops. Broad-topped trees lined the centre of the thin, narrow roads, and everywhere there was colour. The effect would be more startling in full daylight, but it was eminently striking even in nighttime, as the train passed below great spreading skylights in blue and yellow and red and green, violet and gold, ornate as stained glass. The soft gold lights of the city shone through them and cast dappled shadows over the buildings and streets and the green growth below.

  It was a shockingly gorgeous city, where every building was a work of art. Orfeus settled back in her seat and looked across to see Rivasoa looking smug. Well, good to know the Blooded didn’t deny themselves human feelings like smugness.

  “Our technology is among the best in the world,” Rivasoa said. “We use solar panelling of course, the same as any civilised person, for we honour the Earth. But things being of use does not mean they cannot, too, be of beauty. Many of our solar panels are as you have seen, mosaics of colour. The whole city is a work of art, and one that changes with every shifting angle of the Sun, as all art is changed by its viewer.”

  Orfeus nodded, distractedly. Solarglass was one thing, but everything here was so organic. Whole trees reared out of buildings like nothing in Tinctora. “Your whole city is a forest,” she said.

  Rivasoa’s face lit up in a proper smile. For a second, Orfeus thought they might be able to get along after all. “It is the grove,” she said. “Here, things are done correctly.”

  That brought Orfeus back down to solid ground, out of the spinning stained-glass daydream. “What makes you think this is the only way?” she said. “Or the best way? That all others are inferior?”

  “Here is where records of the old world are kept, those that are of use.” Rivasoa stood up as the train pulled into the station, lined with evergreens. “We don’t just think our ways are best, but know it.”

  Orfeus hadn’t really wanted to understand how annoying arrogance could be. Now, she could put herself in the shoes of nearly everyone she’d ever talked to, but she liked her own boots just fine.

  She strode out after Rivasoa and tipped her head back to take in the sights. “Where to now, superior being?” Anywhere was fine, with the leaves and branches overhead and filtered light casting coloured patterns. The street looked dyed, which made her feel more at home.

  “You rested on the bus, yes?” Rivasoa said.

  “You were there,” Orfeus said, instead of directly lying.

  “Yes,” Rivasoa said.

  Rivasoa had some succinct little ways of making it known she was annoyed. Orfeus tucked them away into her memory, tucked her cloak behind her and flourished it at Rivasoa. “Lead the way.”

  A few people walked along the paths that ran underneath the shadows of the verdant forested buildings. Some travelled faster on personal scooters, just over running pace. Orfeus eyed one as it went past, wondering whether Rivasoa would requisition one: she’d gotten passage on the quartertrain very fast.

  Rivasoa just walked, her face grave and her colourful garments shifting in hue with each building they walked by and each panel of glass that caught the light. It was a good place to walk through. It’d be good to try the scooters too. Orfeus had never before been anywhere with streets flat and smooth enough for that kind of travel, but the air was crisp and lights were on in some of the places they passed, conversation rolling out. She felt alive, like she was on the cusp of something. It didn’t feel like anything lurked in the shadows here.

  Maybe half an hour’s walk from the train, Rivasoa stopped and nodded. “There,” she said.

  “There?” Orfeus said, looking. The building in front of them stretched over most of a block. It was only a conservative three or four storeys high, but the creamy white stone of the structure gave it an older look than anything else here, all elaborate carved buttresses. Plants filled every inch of empty space, bursting and brambling out windows and over ledges.

  Rivasoa lifted a hand to point, her sleeve dangling down. The entrance to the building was up a flight of marble stairs, a ramp zigzagging gracefully amongst them. The doors were tall and gilded. From that, from the domed roof and the few remaining gargoyles, this building had been a church or cathedral once.

  Orfeus clasped her hands together. “Are you going to save my soul?”

  “Your beliefs aren’t the problem.”

  So something about her was.

  Rivasoa led her up the stairs and through the imposing doors, which swung open at their approach.

  Inside, it was one vast and unfurnished room. More stained glass windows took up one wall, and chandeliers hung from the ceiling, the richly green kind that filtered air. All the light in here was green and instead of furniture, there was more green. Plants lined the place in a tidily ordered profusion of growth, ferns and flaxes and small trees, a lot of elderberry. This place felt more forest than temple. After a moment, she could make out a few doors leading out, but from the size of it, this room took up most of the building.

  Gathered in waiting was something that put her in mind of a council. Nothing as formal or pretentious as she’d expected, just a loose circle of five people dressed in soft cream-coloured clothes. In full daylight the effect would be dazzling, in this city and only in this city: they would take on the colours of each place they moved through, a shifting prism of light. In the night, it just made them seem pale, curiously washed out.

  “Orfeus,” Rivasoa said and clasped her hands together so her sleeves met. She stepped back and away, walking quietly to a corner of the vast room, by a pond overgrown with lilies. Orfeus had half hoped for some sort of quick comment about what protocol to follow, but at least now she didn’t have to go to the trouble of ignoring it.

  None of the five said anything. Orfeus stretched her arms out and said, “Me.”

  After a fragment of pause, one of them moved forward, a middle-aged white person with a stern face and precise curls of chestnut hair. “Thank you for coming,” they said. Their hoverchair looked almost organic, panels on the side iridescent as beetle wings, and they spoke like someone used to being listened to.

  Orfeus inclined her head to that person in particular. “Thank you for accommodating my request,” she said. “So. You wanted to talk about my music? What is it that caught your interest? Is it the threads of narrative?” She allowed herself a smile. “I thought that might—”

  “We don’t care about your narrative,” said the stern person, looking exasperated. “We care about your magic.”

  “Ah,” Orfeus said.

  “We might have got off on the wrong foot.” The speaker pressed their hands together and dipped their head in a shallow bow. A very shallow bow. “I am Margaux, and use she and her pronouns. I have the honour of being elected by the people of Eldergrove to do my best, in my small way, to represent our interests.”

  Maybe she was elected, but Margaux spoke like a queen.

  “An honour to meet you, Margaux of Eldergrove,” Orfeus said. “And the rest of you?”

  A person behind Margaux, with the typical Elder look – tall, healthy, too serious for their own good – bristled at that, flicking long, fair hair restlessly behind their shoulder. The stockier person next to them, dark-skinned with hair netted up behind their head, put out a calming hand and the fair-haired one breathed in deep through their nose, and out through their mouth, and said nothing.

  Orfeus sighed and let her hands rest on her belt. The pose made her look nervous, but it was better than having nothing to do with her hands. “At least tell me what it is you want. You all have Blood yourselves, you can’t want to steal mine.” She spoke it brazenly, but curled her fingers tight together at the horror of the thought. The Elders were famously possessive of Blood, never allowing its secrets to leave Eldergrove.

  Margaux glanced at the others. “You should not have the Blood,” she said. “It defies explanation. We know of you through your research requests, but in addition t
here were reports of you and your little performances. We watched recordings and saw you do, indeed, have Blood. Here at the grove, you must understand, we pride ourselves on understanding things. We were happy merely to observe you, but now you have contacted us, which shows initiative.”

  Orfeus smirked. “Of course.” She could be relied upon for that.

  “Initiative is not ideal,” Margaux continued. Orfeus’s smirk faded. “You could do anything and be anything, out there in the world, without Elder values. You might give entirely the wrong impression of Blooded.”

  So that was what it was. “Your little community aren’t the only people with Blood, even if you’re the largest group,” Orfeus said impatiently. “No one would look at me and think I’m one of you. I have far too much …” Style, for one. “Of my mother in me,” Orfeus finished. “A small-town girl, by my upbringing. I’m sure no one would tar you with the association.”

  The person with long, long fair hair down nearly to their ankles, the same colourless cream as their robe, said, “The Blood techniques you perform as part of your shows? The showers of sparks and spelling of words?”

  “Those are just party tricks,” Orfeus said slowly. Hardly likely to tar their reputation. “Any showman could do them.”

  “You shouldn’t be able to,” Margaux said. “There is no record of the Blood in your family, on either side.”

  Orfeus froze. After too long a moment, she said calmly, “Your records are impressive.” Her burns and cuts had mostly healed and her head pounded only distantly, but once more it felt hard to breathe. Cold and terrible rage threatened to run wild with her tongue.

  Why would they do such a thing? Who would think it was acceptable? Maylis with her light curls and soft hands, who still had a slight accent despite her family living in Gallia for two generations. Basma, with her beautiful eyes and stories, always wearing the headscarf that Orfeus worried that she was disappointed Orfeus didn’t wear too.