Stavanger Bay league of extraordinarily grumpy gentlemen

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The sound of movement echoed off the salt-caked walls that formed the Leviathan’s cavernous den and Szymon held his ground, his lean musculature held in readiness should the most malevolent of the Cairn brood be gripped by a fit of bad temper. His line of sight was trained somewhere above the cub’s actual height — he had been expecting Skellige himself, if not the dark, unsettling woman — and canted sharply down in surprise with a reflexive curl of scarred lips. Sulphureous eyes attempted automatically to fit the boy into a previous mold — had Sharkbait made a sniveling return? — but the turquoise-eyed wolfling was not the golden child. Nor was he Szymon’s Qilaq or the ebullient foundling Chusi. Without thinking much about the situation or questioning the Leviathan’s motives, Szymon accepted the boy; if Skellige willingly suffered the whelp’s presence, so would the youngest of his brothers. For a long moment Szymon merely watched Rannoch’s stiff movements, registering the salt on his fur and his sullen stare. He had survived the Drop, then.

“What do you want?” grumpily asked the boy, and Szymon lifted a brow at his daring. A shift of his shoulders and a scoffing chuff asked what his tripping tongue would not allow him to do with grace: “isn’t it obvious?” Szymon had called for Skellige. In the Leviathan’s absence, he would bury his gift — Skellige would know it had been caught for him, and no wolf would dare to dig up an offering meant for the salt king. In a deeply unimpressed bass rumble, “What is your n-name?” he asked of the boy, beginning to dig deep furrows in the sand, aided by the webbing of his paws and the powerful muscles of his shoulder that were meant for cleaving through ocean water.

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