As soon as the door shut behind Thorin, I ran up to my room and closed the door to the rest of the world. Leaning against it, I waited till the beating of my heart returned to normal, wondering even then what normal really was. For everything in my life had never been truly normal, having only the appearance of it.
I touched my face, feeling the heat on my cheeks slowly cool against my fingers.
How foolish had I been not to have recognized the words that Thorin spoke? It was a language I had known so long ago, a time filled only with darkness I could not understand. Yet I still understood it, as if I’d been speaking it all this time.
I walked to the side of my bed, and kneeling, I reached beneath it and pulled out a long rectangular wooden box. It was a simple box. There was nothing ornate about it, its edges still in need of some sanding. But it served its purpose to hold everything of value that I owned.
It held the few trinkets, including the sword that Jürgen had made me years earlier, its blade unusually broad and flat, so different from the many swords he’d made anyone else.
“This is yours and yours alone, my child,” I still remember him telling me as he placed the sword on my outstretched hands, its blade cool against my skin. “I tried my best to make it look just like --”
“Like what?” I had asked then, watching as the older man’s face clouded, as if something dark had crossed his mind’s path and stayed there. Then he smiled. “Just like the Narsil that Telchar of Nogrod forged for the King of Numenor,” he said. “But instead of making it for a man, I made it to suit you, my child,” he said. “It’s perfect for your hands and hopefully not too heavy to wield.”
“And where will she ever need such a weapon, Jürgen?” Berndt scoffed as he walked past us on his way to the kitchen so he could scoop a few more spoonfuls of soup into his bowl. “We are not about to war with anyone.”
Jürgen’s face grew hard. “You forget how your parents were taken from you, Berndt,” he said as Berndt sat back down on his chair and began to eat. “I want you never to forget that there is always the threat of war at our doorstep and we always need to be prepared for its eventuality. For there will always be those who seek power over others, whether they be orcs and goblins. Even men.”
Jürgen had been with my parents when they fell, their bodies found next to the wagon that had been looted of everything the goblins had considered of value. The food had been taken but they had strewn all the fabric that my parents had bought with all their hard earned money at Dale. Out of a caravan of six families that totaled over thirty travelers, only seven were left by the time the orcs fled, the rays of the sun filling the horizon.
Jürgen and the other survivors had been left to bury the bodies that included his own wife and young son. It had taken everything in his power not to go after the orcs but he knew it would have been sure death if he had. Not that Jürgen had wished for death to come so many times afterwards, his tears staining his face as I often found his seated by his kitchen table, staring at nothing before him but his hands that he knew had been useless to save the ones he loved.
I lifted open the lid and just as I expected, Jürgen’s gift was the first thing I saw, sheathed in a leather scabbard he had made for it. I picked it up with one hand and pulled out the sword, feeling its balanced weight in my hand. Once upon a time, my arm would have failed to hold it for more than a few seconds, not being used to its weight and balance. But after many sessions of sparring with Jürgen, I was pleased to see that my arm ceased to tremble anymore. Nor did my hands drop the sword because of its weight.
But I had not come up to my room to admire Jürgen’s handiwork.
Setting it to one side, I ran my hand through the many swaths of fabric that lay at the bottom of the box, interspersed by a few jewels that my mother had left me. Jürgen had collected all the fabric he could find from my parents’ wagon and when he returned, he crafted the box and placing the fabric within it, handed it to me shortly after.
“They would have wanted you to have this, child,” he had said then, as tears clouded my vision. To Berndt, Jürgen gave my father’s knife, useless against an orc’s deadly blade.
I looked at the contents of the box and picked up a small piece of jewelry, smiling as I held it in my hand. It was a bit large for my wrist, and when I had been a child, I thought that by the time I reached adulthood, the bracelet would fit me. But it still proved larger than my wrist till one day, it occurred to me that it was a necklace, one that would have graced the neck of a child. Or even her forehead, as if it were an open crown.
And if it was indeed a baby’s necklace, which was highly impractical for a seamstress such as my mother to have, I had no idea how my parents could even have been able to afford such a treasure, for indeed it was a treasure. It was worth more than a horse, I thought, if not five of Lialam’s best horses.
I was grateful that Berndt had never known about such a treasure, for surely he would have asked me to consider using it to pay for whatever would have caught his fancy. Lialam’s horse was not the first.
A ruby lay surrounded within smaller stones, all set in gold, everything about the necklace was breathtaking. The craftsman’s attention to detail was amazing and even in the dim afternoon light that filtered through my windows, it still gleamed as if it were illuminated by the sun itself.
One day, I thought, maybe it would serve as a dowry for the man who would eventually marry me. If that man would ever come into my life, I thought wryly as I returned the necklace back into the box, wrapping it carefully and burying it beneath the swaths of fabric.
But there was already a man who had wanted to marry me.
Master Lialam had been asking for my hand in marriage for the last four years and I could never understand what he saw in me. Besides, he already had two wives of his own and I was the one who made their entire wardrobes. And while it was true that I envied the rich fabrics or brocades and silks that they wore, I did not envy their positions.
It was the one thing that wedged a gap between Berndt and I since Lialam first mentioned marriage. For Lialam had asked him for my hand and without my consent, Berndt had given it, believing himself as the one with authority to give his sister’s hand in marriage. Even Jürgen was livid at what Berndt had done, knowing that it was done out of desire for Lialam’s riches and status.
“Aleanna is not to be traded like cattle just because Lialam promised you wealth and power, Berndt,” Jürgen had said to him angrily that fateful day. “You will tell Lialam that a marriage is out of the question, or I will tell him myself.”
“She is beyond marriageable age, Jürgen,” Berndt had argued then. “Who will marry her but Lialam?”
“It’s not a question of who will want to marry her, Berndt,” Jürgen countered. “It’s Aleanna’s decision if she wants to marry anyone or not.”
“You’re not our father!” Berndt yelled, his face turning red at the thought of having to go to Lialam and retract his consent.
“Your father and mother would never have allowed it if they were alive,” Jürgen said coldly. “If you honor their memory, you will retract your approval.”
When it was done, none of us spoke of it ever again, though I often caught Berndt’s wistful expression everytime Lialam walked through town with his entourage of guards.
Not wanting to think about Lialam, I touched the rest of the pieces inside the box, wanting only to remember mother. My hands touched swaths of fabric that felt smooth to the touch, some of them bearing the lines that mother had drawn upon them with the intent to cut them, probably for a dress magnificent enough for a ball. Some of them were simply fragments of cloth fallen from her work desk that as a child, I had picked up and gathered in my little basket, intending to sew them all into a quilt just for her.
Tears clouded my vision and I began to return everything back into the box quickly, not wanting the emotions to overtake me. But the tears came anyway and as I returned the lid on the box, pushing it beneath the bed once more, I got up, wiping the tears from my face.
I had much to do, I told myself. There was still a dress for little Asha’s birthday that I had to embroider some trim on and I wanted to take advantage of the daylight before it got too dark. But instead of hurrying downstairs, I found myself standing before the mirror, looking at the reflection that stared back at me.
I was never much of a beauty, though my parents always insisted that I was. But don’t all parents do that? I asked myself.
My face was wide at the temples — too wide to be ladylike, I thought. But if one were to ask mother or father, were they still alive today, they’d both claim that my fears about having such a wide forehead were unfounded.
Besides, there were my eyes.
“One can drown in your eyes, lukhudel,” mother used to say, using a term she’d used with me for as long as I could remember. It was in Khuzdul and it meant “light of all lights,” because that’s what I was to her. “And one day, you will be the lukhudel to someone else.”
But at twenty-six, I was still unmarried while all the other girls I had grown up with were now chasing after their own little children, their husbands busy in whatever vocation they chose. Except for Inge, of course, who never really wanted to be married to anyone in the village, insisting that the idea just never appealed to her and that was that.
But then, everyone else just considered her strange, choosing to spend her time with the myriads of herbs that filled her cupboards as she concocted her potions and liniments for every ailment imaginable.
Just as they must think me strange as well, I told myself as I pushed a runaway strand of hair from my face.
I sighed. Why was I being vain all of a sudden, standing before my mirror and wishing I were just as pretty as every other girl in town when I so much work to do? There wasn’t just embroidery on Asha’s dress that needed to be done, I reminded myself again, for Jürgen was giving Berndt and I another one of his sword fighting lessons in the western fields and he always hated it when we were late.
I pushed a strand of hair away from my face and made my way downstairs just as Farmer Nager knocked on the door, muttering that he had to come to pick up his mended shirts when he could be at the inn enjoying a few pints of beer.