Honeyed Pasture she got me going crazy

Deirdre?

Turning to regard with anxious eagerness the approach of the white wolf, Szymon reflected that Deirdre was the first and only white wolf he’d ever been happy to see — he could do without the machinations of his sisters, thank you very much — but the half-smile that just barely twitched at the corners of his kohl-lined lips settled moments later into a frown of consternation. The female who approached immediately gave him pause, for although the smell of her was rich with the woodland spice of Donnelaith, she was decidedly not Deirdre. Worse yet, her dove-grey eyes were eerily like Ksenia’s — and the agitated flicker of his tail reached fever pitch as she drew nearer to him. “Hello,” she said, her voice even and somewhat detached in its civility, and he willed his spine to relax, his lips and brow to remain smooth. She is not Ksenia, you fool, he thought to himself, wielding his bitterness like a weapon to cut the grip this stranger already possessed over him.

It was true. No matter how he tried, he could not see Ksenia’s long-legged lines and decidedly feminine curves in the androgynous body of this woman. She was lithe and willowy, tall enough, but Szymon’s sulphureous eyes mapped the differences: this female’s eyes were smoke in comparison to Ksenia’s cold pools of silvered ice; this female was thicker in the abdomen; this female was not etched in the stylized lines of Ksenia’s “beauty” — and perhaps in Szymon’s eyes, she was more beautiful for not looking like his bitch of a sister. Warily he nodded his head, still not completely certain he was not being tricked. It didn’t pay to underestimate any wolf, female or male. His greeting was a guttural growl, scraping the bottom of his bass register and billowing into a quiet chuff. He hoped Deirdre would come soon, but bent his head with careful slowness nevertheless, tearing off a sizable chunk of meat and tossing it toward the older female. Even if she did not want it, she likely knew someone who did — the wolves of the wilds, Szymon had found, were woefully ignorant of the Sea’s bounty.