Wheeling Gull Isle I got the woofers in my Jeep

He spoke, and her tufted ears popped to attention like cartoon exclamation points, canting eagerly toward him. Apparently, his voice was the only credential required. Seelie flowed across the sand to meet him, her body language entirely innocuous; elongated ears slicked back shyly as her tail whirred like a helicopter rotor behind her, and her catlike paws never quit their sprightly dancing. She wanted to play with him, but he had a mission on his mind — and she sobered at once, shaking her head decisively when he asked about a wolf named Steelhead. How funny! This wolf’s lost boy was a fish, just like her — and all four of her children.

She felt, somehow, that speaking would sunder the easy joy of their meeting. His brow would furrow as he tried to understand her, and he would do his best and muddle along like the rest of them, but maybe he would find the effort more trouble than it was worth. She wished that one of the other seawolves had come along to do her talking for her — but she was also deeply pleased that she’d met him alone.

For now, he belonged to her.

Maybe her bad news had already ruined everything. Maybe it didn’t matter this time that she spoke in incomplete, sometimes indecipherable fragments. Her new self-consciousness regarding the spoken word had everything to do with her children — what would they think, if they saw their mother trying to muddle along aside great speakers like Hemlock, Reed, Faeryn, and Stockholm? They would know the extent of her flaw, then. It was absolute. She could understand everything that was said to her, in multiple languages; but she lacked the muscle memory and the wherewithal to speak with fluid fluency. It hadn’t been a problem when she was a subordinate, the far wandering daughter of a king — but she was a mother and a leader, now.

She wandered nearer, delicate nose outstretched, as she drank in his scent in a soft, hiccupping series of whuffling sniffs. He hadn’t said anything to her that required her to speak, and maybe he was just going to leave now that Steelhead wasn’t here, anyway. There was no need to showcase her incompetence.

Not yet, anyway.