Stavanger Bay i've been trying to fix my pride

“Hello,” offered the bourbon-laced wise woman, and Coelacanth’s tufted ears swept forward upon her skull at the low, feminine voice. An answering croon trembled in her throat as she emerged fully from the ocean shallows and whuffed a second time, a faint mist of saline fanning from her finely tapered snout. Neptune eyes danced skittishly awry as she crept nearer, her feathered tail heavy with seawater but waving gently just the same. The omnipresent, tensile energy that defined the tiny Groenendael hummed a dissonant chord as she came to a halt a few feet away from the viridian-eyed dryad, and she perceived what she thought was a certain disquiet though she could not glean its cause. Without the benefit of the brine, Seelie discerned that the woman had come from Teaghlaigh; Arturo’s scent was faint and bitterly troubled.

Not for the first time, Coelacanth recalled Arturo’s fury and compared it to her first impression of him — laughing gently at Chusi, his fiery eyes finding the soot-stockinged bard again and again. The contrast was so great! She lumped him in the same category as Szymon — unpredictable — for she did not know his true nature and had been robbed of his gentlemanly façade. “Is something wrong?” bespoke the inquisitive tilt of her head and the airy, toneless whisper-whine that withered upon her lips. “Can I help you?”