[private] but they just can't prove it

[Aela]

It turns out that she had been right, and while a part of Aela is pleased with that revelation, she isn’t pleased at the state she finds Wherewolf in. He’s alive, but just barely, she thinks. He is encrusted with mud and sand; he smells foul, as if he really had died and had been rotting on the shore for days. He isn’t Fyr, and while her half-brother is right in that they aren’t friends, he is a recovered piece of her sunken Court.

They aren’t friends; they barely acknowledge their shared blood; but Wherewolf is useful to Aela, even in this dismal condition.

He is a piece on her chessboard, and to his credit, he’s a piece that isn’t Cheri or Obscene.

Feeling the heat and the anger radiating from the girl behind her, a golden ear flicks one way while the other swivels forward. Aela keeps her cool, calculating stare on the splayed pegasus, carefully watching as he tries to find his footing. It’s a silent compromise: she won’t encroach on his space so long as he is done with the theatrics. He looks like a mad-man, grinning wildly with the girl’s torn hair stuck between his fanged smile and the dried blood running from his dark nostrils.

Keeping her part of the bargain, Aela remains where she stands and only raises a brow at Wherewolf’s statement before quipping cryptically back ”I didn’t expect to find a snake on the shore. Wouldn’t you prefer the long grasses than slithering out into the open?”

@Wherewolf