With Flowers In Her Girdle And Wax In Her Ears
Goldberry liked the sum of this second way she had learned, living with Tom. She really did. She liked her lily-bowls, and her sopping skirts, reeds swollen with river water, woven into spider webs beaded by dew: mere rough reflections of her old place in the world, but they were well enough for easing the feel of dry air on her skin. She liked to be able to retreat from the sky she was used to having to swallow whole, to look up and see a roof, rafters grinning back at her. She liked eating as Men did, liked having a heavy stomach and sticky fingers and a stained mouth.
But she did miss life out in the forest's stuttering silences, now and again, particularly past nightfall. Tom's voice was as constant and stubbornly out of place as the rest of him, and her ears were slower, maybe, than the rest of her to soften and reshape their expectations like a one of the bean plants curling around its pole.
After the thousandth 'derry dol!', she almost told him so.
A sign, she decided, that she needed to add another clumsy patchwork comfort to those that surrounded her here. That eve she stayed up late, one eye open to the shifting sky, the other on the honeycomb she was turning to her purpose, her clever hands in flight until she deemed her work well and truly done, and the gray edge of morning guided her to their bed.
If he noticed, come dawn, that she was slow to wake when he sang to her, or that there was a seal of translucent wax in each ear's canal, his only comment was writ in his smile; which answer Goldberry thought she might safely accept without understanding a word of it.