"I've changed my mind," she called over her shoulder.
Fíli moved away from the stove, slow and placid. "I thought you might," he said, without laughing.
Kíli came out of the fog of what he was working on. "I can –"
"We'll need you in a moment," Dís cut him off.
Fíli was taking the gloves from his hands and brushed them off on his clothes. He offered them to her.
"Hold the sides still."
Obediently, Fíli knelt so she could reach over him, and he held the sheets of gingerbread steady. Kíli had gone quietly back to his work. Dís focused on her part. There was art to it. Bent near the better to see her work, she bit her tongue. First it must hold, and then, it must be beautiful. Neither was enough without the other. Icing did not hold a shape. It bowed to the slightest suggestion. Dís was steady of hand and sure of eye. She was sure of herself.
Finally, she stepped back, and she surveyed what she had done.
Fíli looked at her. He cocked one brow in question.
Dís nodded, and, carefully, he released his hold, and stood back.
Kíli was humming to himself while he worked. She hadn't noticed it before.
"I don't know how you were going to do that without help," Fíli said.
"I did manage well enough before you," she brushed stray hair from her eyes.
Kíli raised his head to smile at her.
"How's it coming, then?" she asked.
"It's coming along." He sat back so she could see.
For days, she had been making candies of all sorts. Some were berries found in the late summer and hidden in the bottom of her sugar pot so long they were practically sugar themselves. Some were taffies melted and stirred, strung out long and clipped and facetted to catch the light on their sides. Hard enough it had been to keep the both of them out of her store, but it was worth it to see the wealth of it now.
She'd secured their help for this tradition days ago, and she could not imagine its work without them.
The bowl she'd hidden in the snow the night before, she had brought in, and she'd cut the shape. They'd come after her, cutting tiny holes, making a wondrous pattern of the plain material before them. And for once they'd not eaten half of it while her back was turned.
Kíli had an eye for ornament and a hand suited to the small work. While Fíli filled in the empty places they had cut with molten sugar – dyed bold from the powders she made in the summer – he took the candies she had crafted, and little drops of the clear hardened sugar Fíli left for him, and he painted around the sugared windows they had made.
Once painted and dried hard, the pieces could be built together into a tower, like a fortress made all of icing and candies. But that would not be the best of it.
In the dark of the evening, they would put a candle beneath, and the fire would glow through all the little sugared windows.
There had been competitions in Dale, when she'd been young. And a midwinter fair to display what all had made. And in the night, with all the little towers and houses glowing, there had been dancing.
She remembered the way their eyes had glowed, when they had been only children. She remembered Víli… But she laid that aside. Kíli was looking at her still, looking for her reaction. She smiled at him. "Well done," she said.
His smile spread wide and pleased, cracking the icing that had dried on his cheek.
She brushed it away.
Straightening, she looked over what they had wrought, and the icing that smeared her boys – the sugar dappling their clothes, the thin white bandage that covered the burn on the inside of Fíli's wrist. He'd come over to see what Kíli had done, and they were talking excitedly together. She smiled at them.
"I think this may be the best of them yet," she said.