Eirlys returned to the clearing beside the forest to check in on @Hemlock and to reassure Ceallach that she was alive and well, and it was several days before she trekked out again. This time she wandered under the guise of hunting and tracking, and although it seemed easy enough with Hemlock to lead them, she was quickly finding how hard it was to kill something on her own. By this point she’d failed twice — and she couldn’t be sure, but she had a sneaking suspicion that it’d been the same rabbit both times. The first time it’d simply outrun her, but the second time she’d nearly caught it when it disappeared down a hole in the ground. After she’d caught her breath, the thickset nine-month-old drew herself to all fours and began moving north toward the sea.
This, she could do.
Eirlys gave the sea lions a wide berth, edging toward the bay as she combed the beach for food. Seafood or land prey, the snowdrop was anything but picky, and when she’d eaten her fill she simply plopped down unceremoniously on the shore and began to gnaw on a piece of driftwood. She didn’t share her mother’s hatred for sand and salt and flexed her toes deliciously as she reached out with one heavy paw to drag her prize closer and chew on it from a different angle. This wasn’t really wandering, she reasoned, her glacial eyes automatically sweeping the horizon for a familiar, beloved figure, black-masked and pointed of feature. Looking for Arturo had proved fruitless so far, even when he’d been standing directly in front of her — but that didn’t stop her from trying.
The banded girl picked her way back toward the coast, relief flooding her body when she finally caught sight of the shoreline, waves lapping at the sand instead of simply shummering on the horizon.
@Isengrim was around here, somewhere, but Sif was not used to travelling with a companion, and had done her best to stay out of her brother's way.
When she saw the young shewolf on the beach, however, she left her reticence behind and bounded forward, tail waving in a cheerful arc over her back.
"Hei!" she called out before she reached the other, glad to see another woman once more. (They seemed to avoid Isengrim, for some reason.)
"Do you ocean?" she chattered as she drew near, having gotten used to her easy conversations with Wardruna, and thus, slightly out of practice with her common tongue.
"Lifh here?"
By the time Sif arrived, Eirlys had melted into something resembling a vaguely wolf-shaped blob in shades of tiramisu. She rose at the first sign of company, but not with any real sense of urgency or trepidation, and when she moved away from the stick it was only because she wanted a better look at the other girl. Licking the drool from her chin and cheek, “Hey,” she said.
For a good while that was all she said, because what was she supposed to say?
The snowdrop was awkward, but she was a honey-and-molasses kind of awkward. She didn’t fidget and she didn’t panic. She just stood there looking and listening. All of Eirlys’ trauma was basically collateral damage, and she had no reason to believe she was under attack — but that didn’t mean she knew what she was doing by any stretch of the imagination. A ticklish, fluttery sensation ran through her, and although the corners of her mouth were buoyed up by its effervescence, her glacial eyes were glazed over with the lingering shock of being caught off-guard [not that she was ever on guard, not really, unless you counted her hypervigilance toward what she deemed her flaws]. “You mean, do I live near the ocean?” she asked, not giving the other girl any time to answer before she hurried on: “No. I — well, I used to live on that island to the north.”
And then my papa disappeared and everything else fell apa —
“I don’t live there anymore,” she added, her lilting brogue questioning as she took a breath [finally!] and said, “Do you live here?”
The girl hopped up, friendly and guileless. This attracted the dark girl at once, and she closed more of the distance between them, until she was close enough to see the drool on the other's chin. While this might have repelled some wolves, Sif couldn't help but sidle closer to try and lick it off her face, ears swivelling frantically in an attempt to portray friendliness and attentiveness at the same time. Ocean she knew, but Sif had no idea what an Island was, especially in the context of it being something a wolf could live upon. Fen used to say that no wolf was an island, and she supposed that made sense, if it was something that other beings could live on.
"No, live - " She realized she had no word to describe the little bowl where she lived with Xan, Wardruna, and her sister-wives. " -over there," she finished rather lamely, pointing in the general direction with a tip of her nose. She had decided that it would be too risky to Wardruna's mental health to keep going between the ocean and the valley on a routine basis. She was here to drop off Isengrim with Kingfisher and then be on her way back home. "Where live?" she pressed, quite taken with the young shewolf, and intent on seeing if she could be persuaded to accompany Sif on her adventures. "Do you family?"
The giggle that spilled from Eirlys’ lips at Sif’s touch was a sound so bright and joyful she found herself startled by it. Was she being too loud? Probably. Awkward and shy, she made to return the favor, feeling an automatic deference toward the banded female — but as always, she’d taken too long deciding what to do and was left poking out her tongue at empty air just as the mahogany-eyed girl turned her lovely head. The snowdrop tried to cover it up by looking in the same direction — oh, right! — and sucking her tongue back into her mouth with an audible plip!
“I have family,” she answered slowly, wishing that she had an accent as cool as Sif’s. Her pacing ticked like a slowly climbing rollercoaster car before falling into a rapid downward spiral: “My brother’s name is Ceallach. I used to have a brother named Roarke and a sister named Mallaidh but they got lost and I used to have a mama but a tree fell on her and she died and I used to have a papa but he’s gone now — but we have Hemlock, and Hemlock is our mama too, and she had babies with my papa so they’re my little brother and sister: Droman and Reed — oh.” Eirlys heard herself talking, heard the weird, halting breathiness of her voice, and tried to put a lid on it — but it was too late. Now that she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
More slowly, but quite unable to stop herself, “My mama — Lotte, not Hemlock — she’s never coming back. I think…I think that means my papa and Roarke and Mallaidh…” the girl hiccupped. “I don’t think they’re coming back anymore, either.” Her voice went croaky at the end before dissolving fully into tears: big, fat droplets that welled up in her eyes and disappeared into the dark fur that covered her cheeks. Hoping Sif wouldn’t see, she turned to look in the opposite direction. “Do you have a family?” she asked. “What’s your name?”
Sif's tail wagged a little bit harder in sympathy at each new name that passed Eirlys's maw. She was speaking too quickly for the dark girl to catch most of her words, but that was okay. She heard enough, and it was staggering how many loved ones the other had lost. It reminded Sif of her own childhood, except she could not remember the names of the ones she missed - she could hardly recall their faces.
"No blood," she responded, "but pack. Hussban." She forgot what sister-wives were called, and so, left them out of the equation. Poet was part of the pack either way. "My name is Sif," she added, floudering for a moment before remembering, "What your name?"
Eirlys got ahold of it, got it under control, and turned gamely back to Sif. She was still wrestling with keeping her breathing even and steady, but by the time Sif had finished speaking she’d gotten the whole ventilation thing squared away. “You have a husband already?” she asked incredulously, her voice scaling up on the last two syllables in awe. “Is he very tall and handsome?” The only love stories Eirlys had in her arsenal involved her father, which meant that her criteria for attractiveness was based on Arturo’s lean, long-legged good looks and swarthy coloring. Sif, with her long legs, lean body, and dark coffee-and-cream aesthetic, was a particularly beautiful specimen — and Eirlys wasn’t ashamed when she said a little wistfully, “He was lucky to marry you. You’re the — one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen…Sif.”
Eirlys’ ears fluttered a little with shyness the first time she pronounced the banded female’s name, but she bulldozed bravely onward anyway. “I’m Eirlys — Eirlys Dagny Fearghal,” she said. “You can call me Eiri, if you want to. I kind of — Ceallach calls me that. You can, too.”
Many things still escaped her, but she was learning. Eirlys's surprise triggered her own, and once she'd assured herself that the words meant what she'd thought they meant, Sif went about forumlating her own question about the response. "When should you get hussban?" she asked, realizing that she was not quite sure about the proper timeline.
Sif's ears fell back in embarrassment at the compliments that followed. "Thank you," she replied, because Mix couldn't think of anything nicer for her to say. "You are prretty, too. Eiri."
She liked the way her name sounded when Sif said it, and her tail sped into overdrive even as her cheeks warmed. “Kiitos, Sif. It’s just because of my äiti and papa,” she said, offering a curious mixture of modesty and acknowledgement. She liked her outward appearance well enough — she wore her papa’s colors but mimicked her äiti in shape and pattern. “Anyway, I don’t know when people are supposed to get husbands, but I always thought it was something that happened later,” she confessed. “Like, if you want to have puppies or something.”
The tule kotiin call that was unique to her family sounded in the distance then, and Eirlys’ small, bearlike ears swayed upon her skull to catch it. “That’s Ceallach,” she said with a warm smile for the banded she-wolf. “I have to go home now.” She was sorry to leave the mahogany-eyed girl, having felt such an immediate connection with her, but family came first. “Do you want to come back with me so you know where I live?” she asked, figuring that she could follow Sif home the next time they met — if there was a next time, anyway. “You don’t have to say hi if you don’t want to, but at least you’ll be able to find me — if you ever wanted to.”