Bearclaw Valley devil underneath your grin, sweet thing

wardruna spends a lot of time practicing his hunting skills outside of the valley. part of him secretly hopes that he might come across addie's scent trail. mostly, he's trying to avoid being around all the females in heat lest he ...slip. he has no standing within the pack to breed and he knows himself well enough to know that temptation is not something he's ever been able to resist. the scent of estrus calls to every cell in his body, riles in his blood and rankles like a festering wound. at times it pulls him out of the territory for hours at a time. sometimes it is all day and well into the night. when he does return he nests with his wives, burying his nose into someone's neck so that he might be consumed with @Poet or @Sif's scent instead. it doesn't entirely mute out the scent of estrus but it's worked so far.

it's early morning, before the sun has risen in the distant horizon, when he stirs from slumber and careful not disturb sif or poet rises from his place beside them and exit's their abode to run a patrol. it feels good to stretch his legs and he's able to lose himself in the mindless routine of it, one ear cocked, the only sign that he's paying attention to his surroundings. he appears lost in thought but deception is a game he's good at and multi-tasking is a skill he learned early in his life.

wardruna's only functioning eye is trained on his path to avoid obstacles with a precision that gives the impression that both eyes function. he's spent a lot of time perfecting it, of playing it off smoothly and only admitting to his partial blindness unless he has to. a healer might be able to tell if they get a close look at the blood pooled in his irises of his left eye, if they know what it preludes to in the end. but thus far, no one has asked about it and there are only a few he's willingly told ( and that is all out of necessity, of course ). still, it gives him a disadvantage and allows others to sneak up on him if he's not paying as much attention as he should. it happens to him now, his attention divided between his path along the borders and his thoughts on how he might be able to further along his slowly improving hunting skills.

eventually he becomes distracted ( so much for being good at acting, pft ) and does not hear her approach until she breaches the silence. the world is shrouded abysmal darkness in the left eye and the pupil of wardruna's right eye dilates as he swings his head to fix her in a piercing stare, a slight curl of his lip given to let his displeasure at being startled known. he's always been brash and rakes a critical eye over the small, russet woman. for an instant he almost mistakes her for sif but reels as it occurs to him that she doesn't look anything like his youngest wife. neither does she smell like her or sound like her.

the woman's accent is hard for wardruna, who is (decently) fluent in the common tongue, to decipher at first and he stares at her blankly for a moment, ears roving to cup forth atop his skull before they pivot to the sides of his head. don't think and we've met are words he knows and makes sense of and haphazardly pushes them together in the assumption that it's what she means. it was obvious enough that they hadn't. he doesn't recall ever seeing her before and it's not as if wardruna is easily mistakable for anyone else. "no." he replies, the common tongue word close enough to his native tongue that his accent does not make the word feel heavy or thick on his tongue. "wardruna." he offers her simply, wishing one of his wives were with him. sif, in particular, was much more friendlier and outgoing than her surly husband and he both acknowledge and appreciates the fact.