A/N: Right, I know I'm not allowed to respond to reviewers now, but I just wanted to say thanks to every one who did. So, yeah. Thank you. Onward.
"It's an Elf!" Calla fumbled the fresh loaf of bread and dropped it unceremoniously on the table. "Don't even try to tell me it isn't, Calla, because I didn't grow up with you without learning one or two things and you said very pointedly last night that no mortal man had captured your heart, and that's just the sort of thing I never used to pick up, but I've had years of practice now, and that's what you meant, isn't it?" Calla slowly finished slicing the bread before she turned and, her face stony, said,
"How do you know I didn't mean a Dwarf?"
"A—a D…?" stammered Shiriel. "A Dwarf? Oh, oh, Calla, I didn't think… I, um." Calla cracked a grin.
"My sweet, gullible child, don't be an idiot. It is," she sighed, "an Elf."
"It's an Elf!" squeaked Shiriel. "I didn't really think it was, but you just said it's an Elf!"
"Just following our good King's example," Calla said, skewering a slice of bread on the toasting fork and holding it over the hot embers in the fireplace. Shiriel, who had not actually left the door since flinging it open and declaring her discovery, now wandered in and sat on the table.
"My best friend is in love with an Elf…" she half-muttered to the ceiling, apparently trying to absorb the information.
"Shiriel, don't be silly. I am not in love with an Elf, I'm… it's a crush."
"Well my dear, to be perfectly frank—"
"—As I'm sure you shall be—"
"—you have crushes infrequently enough that this is a major event." Shiriel jumped down from the table and put out a dish of cream for the little grey cat in the street. "So, since it seems that you mean to take your sweet time about falling in love, I am just going to have to make the most of this." Calla removed her toast from the fire.
"That," she said, emphasizing the word by skewering a fresh piece of bread with the toasting fork, "sounds distinctly ominous." She handed bread and fork over to Shiriel. "Should I be worried?"
"On the whole? Yes."
Once again, they were kept hopping all day. Calla sat at her loom, shedding, and picking, and beating, and beneath her hands a rich brocade began to unfold itself. Shiriel scrubbed down the table, covered it, and spread her work across is, keeping the door open for better light. Stitch after stitch after tiny stitch, and slowly the pale green silk thread turned into curling ivy around the edge of one wide sleeve. Shiriel's practiced fingers were so comfortable with the work that she still found time to hassle Calla about the identity of her Mystery Elf. Around noon, Calla declared that since Shiriel had been so clever about figuring out it was an Elf she fancied, that she was going to leave it up to her to work out which Elf it was, as well. Shiriel kept quiet, then, racking her memory of the King's coronation to see if she could recall Calla looking particularly at any of the Elves, and the house was quiet except for the clack of Calla's loom and the rustling of the silk dress as Shiriel rearranged it now and again.
The sun was getting low in the sky when Calla called it a day. She leaned back, rolling her head, trying to loosen the tight knot at the back of her neck that started every day as a dull ache and steadily crescendoed until it became a nagging, intolerable pain. Shiriel, having noticed that the loom had gone silent, came in and rubbed Calla's neck and pressed her thumbs in between her shoulder blades.
"Shiriel, with a friend like you, who really needs a man? Or, you know, an Elf?" Shiriel sat down on the bench and hugged her friend.
"Come on, Calla, let's close up shop and get ready for tonight. I brought over my pink linen."
"In early spring? You'll freeze."
"I'll stay near the fire, or under Cadfael's arm, and anyway, I brought my flannel shift to wear underneath. Honestly, don't you want me to wear it?" Calla was still convinced that she would catch a cold, shrugged and let it go.
The girls tied up their work, shut the door and the shutters and retreated to Calla's bedroom to get ready for the evening. Calla had been wearing a plain dark brown wool dress with the sleeves rolled up and a grey apron, and her long black hair was hanging down her back in a braid. Now she pulled open the doors of her wardrobe and contemplated the two nicer dresses hanging before her.
Calla enjoyed this. In her everyday life, she tended to be a no-fuss no-frills sort of girl. Her daytime dresses were unadorned, she wore no jewelry, did her hair simply and often wore a thick, clunky belt covered in pouches, where she kept cloth samples, spare shuttles, accounts records, order details, and anything else she thought she might need to hand during the work day, and sometimes it was just nice to dress up and feel pretty. She had a grand total of two out-of-the-ordinary dresses, a blue silk and a red velvet, but these, she prided herself, were more or less splendid. She had woven the cloth herself, so, while she had paid a pretty penny for the materials, she hadn't paid for labor and things had come out roughly even. At least that was how she justified the expenditure to herself. Privately she confessed to herself that she was a snob about the quality of fabric, but she thought that, given her talent and profession, she could be excused.
She pulled out the red velvet and ran her hand across it. Since the material of these dresses was so superior to anything most girls of her station wore, she had kept them unembroidered and simple; she didn't want to make a spectacle of herself. Shrugging off her working dress, she slipped on a clean shift, pulled the red velvet over her head, and tugged and straightened smoothed it out. She belted it, then she brushed out Shiriel's long hair and Shiriel brushed out hers and they stood and faced each other for a final insection.
"Sweet as a rose," Calla declared.
"Just beautiful, my dear, really I will be amazed if your Mystery Elf doesn't sweep you off your feet the minute he sees you, or at the absolute, very least come over and introduce himself. Oh, and I'll be watching you all night to see who he is, you do know that, right? I mean to know by the time I get home, so I'm keeping my eyes on you all evening."
"You will forget all about it the first time Cadfael takes your hand and leads you into a dance. Come on, let's hurry so we don't get stuck at the end of a table."
They were late anyway, but Cadfael had saved them seats. As they sat down, Calla's eyes flicked to the high table. He was there all right, sitting to one side of the King, in all his golden glory. His head was bent, as he listened to something that the Dwarf to his right was saying, but as he listened, whether by complete chance or because he felt someone watching him, his eyes flicked away from his friend and looked directly into hers. Calla felt herself go scarlet and looked away and gazed avidly at her plate.
"Calla?" Cadfael's voice interrupted her just as she was beginning to berate herself for being the most idiotic clodhopper ever to waddle over the face of the earth. "Are you too warm? You look a bit flushed."
"Yes, thank you, would you pour me some wine?" As she drank from her goblet, she stole a sideways glance back up at the high table. He was looking away again, absorbed once more in talk and laughter with his friends. He probably didn't even register me. What a little fool I am!
It turned out that Calla had been wrong about Shiriel forgetting to watch her closely when she went to dance. In point of fact, the whole plan seemed to slip her mind almost as soon as she sat down, so the three of them spent the evening, again, pleasantly. When they had finished eating, Cadfael danced two dances with Shiriel, and one with Calla, and then a third with Shiriel. After that one of Shiriel's cousins found her and whisked her away to chat with her aunt, and Cadfael came and sat down next to Calla, frowning slightly.
"Calla," he said, watching Shiriel happily trading gossip with her aunt, "have you noticed how much Shiriel loves that dress? I—It's not that I don't like it, I think she looks very pretty, but even I can tell it's awfully expensive. Linen's something of a luxury item, isn't it? I didn't think you could get it around here, not easily. And I… Well, you're her best friend. Tell me, please, do you think that Shiriel's going to expect me to be able to pay for things like that often? I'm just a guard. That's not the kind of thing I can afford all the time. Is she going to be disappointed?"
Calla laughed.
"Don't worry about it, that's not why she loves the dress. At least, it is a little, Shiriel and I both appreciate quality, but that's not mostly it. It's just that after a great deal of work and trouble I produced that pink linen for her eighteenth birthday. She was so entirely bowled over that I ended up having to persuade her to accept it at all. And even then it was nearly a month before she could bring herself to turn it into a dress, since, as she said, she 'couldn't bear the thought of cutting up all of Calla's lovely work. It's not that she's spoiled, Cadfael, it's just Shiriel being sweet." Calla paused for a moment, and mused, on her friend's behavior.
"You know, when she did give in, and after the dress was finished, there was a little cloth left over which she has vowed she will make into the cover for a little pillow for her firstborn baby girl."
Cadfael smiled—a nice smile but one which clearly said "women!" all the same. Calla plucked absently at the skirt of her dress for a moment before she looked up at him, her face serious.
"And, actually, I've got something to ask you. When you and she get married, are you still going to let her work? Will you want her to stay home? Normally I wouldn't ask, except that… I really don't think I can run the business alone."
"Well in that case, let me put your mind at ease: I have no intention of asking her to stop working. She's happy with her work, and I wouldn't dream of splitting you two up. Much too risky a thing to try; I'm afraid if I ever made her choose between the two of us, she'd run off with you."
Calla laughed and they fell into quiet banter until Shiriel came back and sat between them.
"Well," she said, "You wouldn't believe the great store of information I now have on all of my cousins' sniffles, calluses, and bunions. Somehow, even the nicest aunts get like that, I think, which makes me exceedingly glad that I have no brothers or sisters to go about having nieces and nephews—sons and daughters, of course, I mean, but nieces and nephews to me—and making me into an aunt, and also, Calla, do you realize that Lord Faramir is talking to someone who is pointing at you?"
"What?"
"Right over there." Shiriel twitched her eyebrows expressively. Calla's gaze followed this vague signal, and she saw that, sure enough, on the far side of the fire, Lord Faramir himself was talking to a soldier was pointing her out to him. Calla watched them covertly, pretending to gaze into the fire. Lord Faramir clapped the soldier on the shoulder, said something that looked rather final, and then faded away into the crowd. Almost immediately, the soldier started coming over. When he was on her side of the fire, she suddenly recognized him—this man had served with her father, and she had met him once or twice before. Calla now pretended not to notice, still watching the fire intently, until the soldier stopped and called her name. Calla jerked her head up then, as though arising from a reverie.
"Yes? Oh, hello!" She smiled at him.
"Calla, would you mind? I have a message for you." Calla glanced at Shiriel who was practically squirming with excitement. Calla stood and went of a little ways with the soldier, racking her brains for his name.
"Calla, I've just been speaking to Lord Faramir—" (Here Calla raised her eyebrows as though in politely surprised interest) "—and he requests that tomorrow night you be his guest at the second table." At this, Calla gasped. The second table was reserved for soldiers, men who had distinguished themselves in battle. "He knew your father and your brother, you know, and he was telling me how much he wished that they could be seated there, and I mentioned you. So. He asked that I extend this invitation. I think he wanted it to come from someone familiar," he added when Calla was silent for a moment. Calla took a deep breath, blinking back tears.
"Please tell Lord Faramir that I would be honored to accept his invitation," she choked out. The soldier nodded and went away, and she stood, swaying a little for a moment, until Shiriel, unable to restrain her curiosity, came rushing over expectantly.
"Well?" When Calla told her, she, too, gasped. "Oh, Calla, what an honor! You accepted didn't you? Are you… all right?"
"Yes," Calla sighed, her poise regained. "I just didn't know a compliment could feel so much like an open wound." Shiriel put her arms around her, and they hugged briefly.
Calla was quiet for the rest of the night—not melancholy, just subdued. Her father's death, two years ago, still hurt, but it wasn't the fresh, keen stab in her heart that her brother's death was. Still, she was a woman of Gondor, and if there was one thing that women of Gondor were used to, it was loss; years and years of the loss of good men, sons and fathers, brothers and husbands. Comfort came not from empty assurances that things would be all right, but from the certainty they had that those who died in battle did so proudly and did not regret it. So when tears prickled in Calla's eyes now and then she scarcely knew whether they were from grief—she could hear her heart crying out for them to come back, please, please, to their own Calla—or from the fierce pride she felt on their behalf.
Shiriel and Cadfael were dancing again, and Calla, sitting alone now, gazed absently about her. Eventually her eyes wandered up—again—to the high table where the king and his betrothed were still sitting side by side. The Dwarf she had noticed before appeared to have gone to sleep in his chair, and the Halflings…well, two of them were still decorously in their seats, but the other two were standing on their chairs apparently (as far as Calla could tell) singing. She grinned, and glanced to the side of them. The Elf was watching them as well, and his head was thrown back and he was smiling and his eyes were dancing and… and…
"Oh," whispered Calla to herself. "Oh, oh, oh." He was simply too beautiful. It almost hurt to look at him. Calla went on looking anyway.
A/N: Okay, a few things. First off, next chapter, Calla'll actually meet Legolas, so the story should start moving along a bit more quickly, then. I know that my pacing tends to be kind of slow, but I hope that's all right. I wanted to show a bit about Calla and Shiriel's daily life, though, so that they'd actually be real people with ordinary things going on.
Secondly, I am assuming that, to a greater or lesser extent, every natural fibre except wool is a luxury item, since I doubt that silk, linen, or cotton are produced in the climate of Gondor—but then, the production of textiles in climates presumably similar to England isn't exactly my area of expertise. If anyone should happen to know and felt like leaving the info in a review, I would not object… I also assume that, therefore, there's some trade going on with some pretty foreign places, since Arwen, in the movies, was definitely not wearing wool all the time.
Thirdly, I hope people are not going to be bothered too much by descriptions of clothes. I know this is a Mary-Sue flag; it's just that Calla's a weaver, and one who likes what she does and takes pride in it, so I consider that it's the sort of thing she's likely to notice.
Finally, if you've read, please review! I gotta say, I personally feel this chapter is a little blah. Kinda too much a repeat of the first? My only excuse is that, again, I wanted to show a little bit of Calla's daily life.