BOUND BY THE BLOOD MOON

First Morning in the Compound

She woke at five thirty, which was her normal time, and lay in the unfamiliar room for a moment listening to the compound's morning sounds before she remembered where she was.

The fire had burned to coals. The stone walls were cold and the light through the high window was the particular grey blue of very early morning and outside she could hear, faintly, the movement of the compound beginning its day.

She got up.

Her field kit was beside the bed, which meant someone had returned it from wherever it had gone after the gate last night. Her notebook was on the side table where she had left it when she finally stopped writing around two in the morning. Her jacket, which had been damp from the walk through the forest, had been dried and hung on a peg near the door.

She examined each of these facts in turn and made notes about what they implied: a community that was organized and attentive and that had collectively decided, in response to whatever Caden had said in the courtyard, to manage her presence with practical competence rather than continued hostility.

She went to find the bathroom, which was down the corridor and adequate, and then went in search of coffee.

The kitchen was at the back of the main hall, a large and warm space that smelled of bread and wood smoke, and the woman behind the central worktable looked at her when she came in with the expression of someone who had been briefed and was proceeding from the briefing.

"Coffee," the woman said, and it was not a question.

"Please," Seraphina said.

The coffee was good. She stood at the kitchen window with it and looked out at the courtyard and the compound beyond and thought about everything she had written down last night and everything she still needed to understand.

The woman's name, she learned over the course of the next half hour, was Mara, and she had been managing the compound's kitchen and general domestic operations for sixty years, and she had opinions about how the new situation was being handled that she shared with the directness of someone who had been doing important work for a very long time and did not feel the need to soften her assessments.

"He should have explained better," Mara said, refilling her coffee without being asked.

"He explained clearly," Seraphina said. "I appreciated the clarity."

Mara looked at her. The assessment was rapid and thorough. "You're not scared."

"I was in the clearing. The fear passed." She looked at her coffee. "I am a person who manages fear by understanding what caused it. Understanding is in progress."

Something in Mara's expression shifted. Not warmer exactly. More settled.

"The herb garden," Mara said, after a moment. "Behind the east wing. The healer Petra tends it. If you are interested in the local plant life, she would not object to questions."

"Thank you," Seraphina said.

She found the herb garden before she found the eastern grove, and she found Petra in it, and Petra was a woman of approximately seventy human years with the calm of someone who had been paying attention to living things for a long time, and she did not object to questions.

She had many of her own.

They spent two hours in the herb garden on the first morning, and when Seraphina finally made her way to the eastern grove with her field kit, she had already begun to understand that the compound was not simply a place. It was a community that had been built by people who intended it to last, and it was, in its specific and accumulated way, extraordinary.