Crafty Crafty

The mustached primate poked around at the bracer and looked over the rows of junk that the golden stranger had brought, and at length seemed satisfied with Artur's plan, nodding.

Artur was delighted when the blue stranger agreed to his deal. Thanks to the crafter and his crafty monkey, he'd be getting the weapons he sought. He was even more pleased when the stranger seemed to recognize his family's name. But that pleasure quickly began to fade when the stranger jovially proceeded to link him with Valhalla and to Aurielle as her... kin. "You are mistaken," he said stiffly, fury nearly choking him. Would he never get away from the specter of Aurielle and fucking Valhalla? Was that going to be what every wolf knew when they knew the name of Adravendi? The glowing, long-haired, self-aggrandizing bitch who had taken everything from him? His mother, the time he could have spent with her that she'd had to spend dying in service to the pretender to their name, his siblings, the chance to have been taught instead of fighting for every scrap of knowledge he'd gained? And now he couldn't even introduce himself without her somehow managing to stick her nose into it. He kept his voice level, and kept the heat from it with great effort. He didn't need to piss Jupiter off now and lose his trade. Diplomacy. "Aurielle is not an Adravendi. Her great-grandmother took my family's name for her bastard pups by guile, as the last mistake of a dying old man she'd taken advantage of. She and her family are no more Adravendi than you are."

He swallowed down the anger and humiliation to ruthlessly jerk his attention back to the primate who was asking him about the design. He pressed his lips firmly together, determined to concentrate only on that. Carefully he counted out eight of the sixteen sharpened claws and passed them to the primate, keeping back the other ten. "A row of them on each, if you please. I believe the redundancy will give it more chances to catch on flesh."

The golden male, at least, seemed to attach no significance to Aurielle sharing his name, and introduced himself as Pyrrhic Abraxas, a name Artur carefully filed away along with Jupiter's. "I look forward to seeing what you craft as well, Pyrrhic. Perhaps we will be fortunate enough to be able to test them together in a spar in the future." He tilted his head and, in a strangely impulsive and generous gesture, offered the other eight full-sized claws to him, keeping back only the two dewclaws. "Here, why don't you take these? You may find some use for them as well, as it seems you're a crafter in your own right and I am not."

WC: 463