Shadewood I went out to the hazel wood

Oh, good, thought Saena with a rush of relief when Arunik'ra agreed with her assessment of her titles. While she was no stranger to being an abrasive and tactless wolf, Saena had changed enough to care about whether that was the first impression she gave. These days she would prefer to not make new enemies. She had enough lurking in the fog of her yet missing memories.

The name of the place Arunik'ra gestured was unfamiliar, if only because Saena had named her woods and nowhere else, but she followed the invisible line that the red woman's snout drew and she was sure knew the place. She'd only been there once or twice, but she'd certainly walked in it. To know it was claimed now sent a weird feeling lancing through her stomach, a vestigial reaction from her days as a leader with many foes, but she quickly composed herself. It was inevitable that other wolves would seek to claim the land, and they were far from her home in the south, and anyway, she no longer called the shots.

"Malkaria," she repeated quietly, rolling the word in her mouth. Some of the other things Arunik'ra said sailed right over her head, and others she couldn't have pronounced if she tried, but she got the gist of it. It was a small group that followed the light of something-or-other. She assumed that was a religion based on Arunik'ra's next question, to which she shook her head.

"I was raised without beliefs," she shared, although she was willing to bet that she wouldn't have willingly believed in anything anyway. If only she could remember further back, when she was very young and dreamed at times of a simorgh and a white bear named Atka, and if only she had known her mother's secret belief in those things, and Hawkeye's, the ones they had never shared (or never been able to). "But spirits visit me," she added, and immediately wondered why she had been compelled to share that with a perfect stranger, when the only other wolves who knew were her estranged adoptive father, Lasher, and her ex-mate.