Fic: A Favourable Arrangement (Chapter 2)
Feb. 2nd, 2014 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grav_ityChapter 1
Chapter 2
One year before
Sigrid smooths her dress, again, and does her best not to worry too visibly. Her father is already on edge, the idea of this marriage has raised in him aspects of himself he does not like, and she is doing her best not to make it any worse. Tilda sits beside her, excited at the prospect of seeing “her” dwarves again. Sigrid has an arm around her waist, under the guise of keeping the younger girl in her seat. In reality, she clings to Tilda as though her sister is a piling and Sigrid their rickety old Lake-town house. Maude sits in the corner, stitching as always, and Bain has disappeared.
When the footman shows the party in, Bard stands. He has learned how to shake hands with Balin without hunching over or causing the dwarf to stand on tip-toes. He does not show Fili the same regard, and he does not have the opportunity to shake Kili’s hand at all, because as soon as she lays eyes on him, Tilda gives a cry of laughter and hurls herself into his arms. Maude clucks, but Sigrid’s pretty sure her heart isn’t in it. Kili is well known in Dale, and serves in the guard occasionally. Sigrid is frankly grateful for anything that cuts the tension.
Fili takes the seat Tilda has vacated, keeping a respectful distance between them. Oin has not come, to Tilda’s disappointment. His hearing is even worse, and parlour gatherings are not to his taste. She brightens, though, when Kili mentions the new automaton he has brought for her, and they retire to a corner to wind it, under Maude’s careful eye.
Balin and Bard speak of the weather on the Long Lake, and Sigrid does her best to listen attentively. Beside her, Fili does not even try. Instead, he looks at her. It’s not appraising, exactly, as though she were a stone for carving or meat for the table. It’s more like he is wondering what she might become, if given the right opportunity, as if she were a pretty jewel already, and he had only to find the best setting.
Since he’s staring at her, she cannot look back at him. She feels this is distinctly unfair. Her father and Balin have moved on to the state of the fisheries, and she looks at Fili’s boots to keep from collapsing in a ball of nerves. They are much finer now than they had been when he arrived at Lake-town for the first time, but still worn around the toes and heels. Prince he may be in truth, now, but he still walks on his own feet.
For some reason, this gives her the courage to look at his face, and he smiles when she does.
“I’ve a trifle for you, my lady,” he says. He does not put the slightest emphasis on the “my”.
“Thank you, my lord,” she replies, for lack of anything else to say.
“I think we ought to be just Fili and Sigrid,” he says, pulling a carefully wrapped package from his pocket. “This is already about as formal as I can manage.”
She returns his smile at that. It’s true enough. They are both of them from common means, and find themselves heirs to fortunes they had only dreamed of when winter winds and hungry siblings were foremost in their concerns.
He places the package in her hands without touching her. It’s warm against her skin from being in his pocket. The cloth is not particularly fine, dwarf-make, she can tell, but the embroidery is in real gold thread. She unwraps it carefully, and soon holds a piece of clear crystal, polished to be so transparent that she can see her own freckles through it. Inside the crystal are several small blooms, red and orange and yellow.
“It’s beautiful, my – Fili,” she says, and means it. “Thank you. What sort of flowers are they? I don’t recognize them.”
“They come from Ered Luin,” he says. “From my mother’s garden, there. Flowers don’t grow so well on the Mountain, but the Blue Mountains had many of them.”
“However did they get here?” Sigrid asks.
“Raven,” he says. “I had a special wrap designed to keep them safe, and then set them in the crystal as soon as they arrived. I can show you how, if you like, after...well, someday.”
He thinks their marriage is inevitable too, she understands, and he is not offended by it. A weight she didn’t realize she carried is lifted from her.
“I would like that,” she replies.
She cannot say anything else to him, because Balin asks a question about the silk trade that her father does not know the answer to, and she is requested to give it. By the time she has recounted all she knows, the tea is brought, and Tilda finds her way back to the bench, sitting between them and chattering happily about the automaton Kili brought for her.
Fili’s hand brushes against hers when she passes him the plate of sweet rolls over Tilda’s lap. It is the first time he has touched her since the day he held her against the over-turned table while orcs crashed through the ceiling of her house.
+++
Tilda climbs into their bed, her hands and face still wet from washing. It’s still strange not to pour the washing water out the window, but not living in the middle of the Lake has its advantages, and one of them is that even when her bedmate climbs into bed with damp hands, Sigrid is rarely so cold she can’t sleep anymore.
“Sigrid,” Tilda says when she has settled on her pillow. “Are you sad to marry a dwarf?”
“No, Tilda,” she says. “It is only that we do not know each other very well.”
“You should be more like Kili and me,” Tilda advises. “We play all the time, and I know him very well.”
“Unfortunately that isn’t proper,” Sigrid says, though privately she agrees.
“Well,” Tilda says, “if Kili were not in love with Lady Tauriel, I would marry him and you would not have to marry Fili. But I think you should anyway.”
“Oh,” Sigrid says, now amused. “And how are you an expert in this?”
“Maude told the kitchen girls what he brought you, and they scoffed because it wasn’t jewels and gold,” Tilda says. “Maude said “Aye, gold and jewels are right easy for the like of him. He has only to go into any room and find them aplenty. But flowers? From across the world? That is princely.” And I think she is right. Kili always brings me things I like, not things that are rich, and you don’t have any jewels, so Fili doesn’t know what sort you like.”
That is true enough, Sigrid knows. She had only one piece that had been her mother’s, and it lies at the bottom of Long Lake, underneath the body of a dragon. She also knows that Tilda heard the observation about her tastes, or lack thereof, eavesdropping on the women who work in the house. She ought to have stopped her sister doing that, except sometimes it’s the only way they learn things that their father cannot teach them.
“Addie said that the way he looks at you is reassuring, but then she said something I didn’t understand,” Tilda continues. “I am fairly certain it was rude.”
“Tell me,” Sigrid says, hoping that if she sounds desperate her sister will not notice.
“She said “If the dwarf prince is as broad elsewhere as he is across the shoulders, our poor Sigrid is” and then Maude made her stop,” Tilda says. “But everyone laughed, so I knew it must be unseemly.”
“It was most unseemly,” Sigrid tells her. She blushes hard in the dark. She would be a liar if she said that thought had not crossed her mind. At least now she knows she was right to worry about it.
“Will you tell me?” Tilda asks.
“No,” Sigrid tells her. “Maybe someday, Tilda. But if I tell you now...”
Tilda slides across the mattress under the heavy coverlet and wraps herself around her sister, as they used to do when the nights were cold.
“I’d be scared too,” she says. “Even if it was Kili, and I knew he was a merry sort.”
Sigrid’s reply sticks in her throat, but Tilda doesn’t notice or care. Instead she burrows in even closer, and they fall asleep as they had done when they were children of the Lake, not Ladies of Dale.
+++
Present Day
Sigrid escapes to the bath as soon as she is sure the fire will consume the sheet in its entirety. Part of her is ashamed at the waste, surely there wasn’t that much blood, and she might have cleaned it without anyone knowing, but more of her is relieved that it is gone, and gone without Fili seeing it. That he might come into the bath occurs to her, but once she is in the hot water she cannot make herself rush. He does not join her, but they take breakfast together. He tells her that he has duties to attend to, but will return as soon as possible. He does not mention the sheet.
“Will you be all right for the day?” he asks, pulling his ceremonial daggers to straighten the belt he sheathes them in.
“Yes,” she assures him. “I have to oversee the arrangement of my things, and I would like to learn how the Mountain operates as soon as possible.”
“My mother will help you, until you have your own ladies,” Fili says. According to the marriage contract, Sigrid is entitled to her own household, but she must staff it mostly with dwarves.
“Thank you,” she says.
He looks like he wants to say something more, and she wonders if she ought to kiss him, but then he is gone. They will tease him today, she is sure of it, newly wedded and newly bedded as he is. She tries not to think about it.
Breakfast is cleared away, and Dis arrives to help her organize her rooms. Sigrid spends the day doing familiar things, if on a grander scale than she is used to, and by the time dinner arrives, with Fili right behind it, she is feeling almost at home. The meal is a repeat of breakfast, polite and nearly strained, and then they retire to sit by the fireplace until the inevitable can no longer be put off.
+++
Fili is reading correspondences that he might have read during the day, except he saved them in case the evening became awkward. The fire crackles merrily, the only sound. Sigrid’s attention is on her lap, where her hoop rests. She stitches efficiently, and he tries his best not to think about how deft her fingers must be.
“What are you making?” he asks, before he does something unbearably stupid.
“It’s nothing, really,” she says, but passes the hoop over anyway. “Growing up, I was always sewing at night, with Bain being all elbows and knees, and Tilda growing faster than I could hem her dresses. After the dragon, mending was work for the maids, and I had to find something else. We didn’t do much embroidery before, there’s no real call for it, but it keeps me from being idle.”
“It’s beautiful,” he says, and means it. She’s stitched the Mountain, all greys and greens. Below it is Fili’s crest, and above is the outline of hers.
“It’s a handkerchief,” Sigrid says.
“When you cross the world with a Hobbit, you learn the value of a good handkerchief,” he says, smiling as he hands it back. She smiles too, and he counts it as a victory.
“Most dwarves have a night-craft, like your sewing,” Fili says.
“A night-craft?” she asks.
“Well, we’ve got our main crafts, which is how we make our way in the world,” he explains. “Mine used to be jewelry making, like Kili, but now I spend my days at politics.”
“You don’t like it?” she asks.
“It’s different, is all,” he tells her. “I miss making things, you see.”
“I do,” she says, looking up from her stitches.
“Anyway, in the evening, we do other things. More home-like, I suppose,” he continues. “Kili fletches arrows, for example.”
“What do you do?” she asks. She sets the hoop aside, interest unfeigned.
“It’s easier to show you,” he says, and stands up.
He goes to his dressing room, and opens the worn case at the bottom of one of his wardrobes. He’d lost his travel violin to the goblin caves, of course, but this one had been carried to Erebor by his mother, over safer roads. There were better made ones in the hoard, but Fili would not trade. It would be like giving away an old friend.
Sigrid’s face lights up when he returns, and he feels like that alone has made the whole evening worthwhile.
“Not the most practical craft for a group of nomads,” he admits, “but I love it. Shall I play milady a tune?”
“Please,” she says.
She does not know the drinking songs from Ered Luin, of course, but he plays them for her anyway. He sings the less bawdy ones, and she claps her hands in time and turns a most appealing shade of pink. Without thinking, he plays the Misty Mountain song, and sings the old words he was raised with, not the new ones written in times of gladness.
“I had not heard that version,” she says, when he is done.
“It does us good to remember,” he tells her, and then begins to play jauntier tunes again, though once again they cannot dance.
She falls asleep with the firelight on her face, and a smile on her lips. He tucks her carefully into their bed, and crawls in on the other side, as far from her as he can manage, even though he wants nothing more than to dance with her, and fall, breathless, into the sheets at last.
It takes him a very long time to fall asleep.
+++
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
One year before
Sigrid smooths her dress, again, and does her best not to worry too visibly. Her father is already on edge, the idea of this marriage has raised in him aspects of himself he does not like, and she is doing her best not to make it any worse. Tilda sits beside her, excited at the prospect of seeing “her” dwarves again. Sigrid has an arm around her waist, under the guise of keeping the younger girl in her seat. In reality, she clings to Tilda as though her sister is a piling and Sigrid their rickety old Lake-town house. Maude sits in the corner, stitching as always, and Bain has disappeared.
When the footman shows the party in, Bard stands. He has learned how to shake hands with Balin without hunching over or causing the dwarf to stand on tip-toes. He does not show Fili the same regard, and he does not have the opportunity to shake Kili’s hand at all, because as soon as she lays eyes on him, Tilda gives a cry of laughter and hurls herself into his arms. Maude clucks, but Sigrid’s pretty sure her heart isn’t in it. Kili is well known in Dale, and serves in the guard occasionally. Sigrid is frankly grateful for anything that cuts the tension.
Fili takes the seat Tilda has vacated, keeping a respectful distance between them. Oin has not come, to Tilda’s disappointment. His hearing is even worse, and parlour gatherings are not to his taste. She brightens, though, when Kili mentions the new automaton he has brought for her, and they retire to a corner to wind it, under Maude’s careful eye.
Balin and Bard speak of the weather on the Long Lake, and Sigrid does her best to listen attentively. Beside her, Fili does not even try. Instead, he looks at her. It’s not appraising, exactly, as though she were a stone for carving or meat for the table. It’s more like he is wondering what she might become, if given the right opportunity, as if she were a pretty jewel already, and he had only to find the best setting.
Since he’s staring at her, she cannot look back at him. She feels this is distinctly unfair. Her father and Balin have moved on to the state of the fisheries, and she looks at Fili’s boots to keep from collapsing in a ball of nerves. They are much finer now than they had been when he arrived at Lake-town for the first time, but still worn around the toes and heels. Prince he may be in truth, now, but he still walks on his own feet.
For some reason, this gives her the courage to look at his face, and he smiles when she does.
“I’ve a trifle for you, my lady,” he says. He does not put the slightest emphasis on the “my”.
“Thank you, my lord,” she replies, for lack of anything else to say.
“I think we ought to be just Fili and Sigrid,” he says, pulling a carefully wrapped package from his pocket. “This is already about as formal as I can manage.”
She returns his smile at that. It’s true enough. They are both of them from common means, and find themselves heirs to fortunes they had only dreamed of when winter winds and hungry siblings were foremost in their concerns.
He places the package in her hands without touching her. It’s warm against her skin from being in his pocket. The cloth is not particularly fine, dwarf-make, she can tell, but the embroidery is in real gold thread. She unwraps it carefully, and soon holds a piece of clear crystal, polished to be so transparent that she can see her own freckles through it. Inside the crystal are several small blooms, red and orange and yellow.
“It’s beautiful, my – Fili,” she says, and means it. “Thank you. What sort of flowers are they? I don’t recognize them.”
“They come from Ered Luin,” he says. “From my mother’s garden, there. Flowers don’t grow so well on the Mountain, but the Blue Mountains had many of them.”
“However did they get here?” Sigrid asks.
“Raven,” he says. “I had a special wrap designed to keep them safe, and then set them in the crystal as soon as they arrived. I can show you how, if you like, after...well, someday.”
He thinks their marriage is inevitable too, she understands, and he is not offended by it. A weight she didn’t realize she carried is lifted from her.
“I would like that,” she replies.
She cannot say anything else to him, because Balin asks a question about the silk trade that her father does not know the answer to, and she is requested to give it. By the time she has recounted all she knows, the tea is brought, and Tilda finds her way back to the bench, sitting between them and chattering happily about the automaton Kili brought for her.
Fili’s hand brushes against hers when she passes him the plate of sweet rolls over Tilda’s lap. It is the first time he has touched her since the day he held her against the over-turned table while orcs crashed through the ceiling of her house.
+++
Tilda climbs into their bed, her hands and face still wet from washing. It’s still strange not to pour the washing water out the window, but not living in the middle of the Lake has its advantages, and one of them is that even when her bedmate climbs into bed with damp hands, Sigrid is rarely so cold she can’t sleep anymore.
“Sigrid,” Tilda says when she has settled on her pillow. “Are you sad to marry a dwarf?”
“No, Tilda,” she says. “It is only that we do not know each other very well.”
“You should be more like Kili and me,” Tilda advises. “We play all the time, and I know him very well.”
“Unfortunately that isn’t proper,” Sigrid says, though privately she agrees.
“Well,” Tilda says, “if Kili were not in love with Lady Tauriel, I would marry him and you would not have to marry Fili. But I think you should anyway.”
“Oh,” Sigrid says, now amused. “And how are you an expert in this?”
“Maude told the kitchen girls what he brought you, and they scoffed because it wasn’t jewels and gold,” Tilda says. “Maude said “Aye, gold and jewels are right easy for the like of him. He has only to go into any room and find them aplenty. But flowers? From across the world? That is princely.” And I think she is right. Kili always brings me things I like, not things that are rich, and you don’t have any jewels, so Fili doesn’t know what sort you like.”
That is true enough, Sigrid knows. She had only one piece that had been her mother’s, and it lies at the bottom of Long Lake, underneath the body of a dragon. She also knows that Tilda heard the observation about her tastes, or lack thereof, eavesdropping on the women who work in the house. She ought to have stopped her sister doing that, except sometimes it’s the only way they learn things that their father cannot teach them.
“Addie said that the way he looks at you is reassuring, but then she said something I didn’t understand,” Tilda continues. “I am fairly certain it was rude.”
“Tell me,” Sigrid says, hoping that if she sounds desperate her sister will not notice.
“She said “If the dwarf prince is as broad elsewhere as he is across the shoulders, our poor Sigrid is” and then Maude made her stop,” Tilda says. “But everyone laughed, so I knew it must be unseemly.”
“It was most unseemly,” Sigrid tells her. She blushes hard in the dark. She would be a liar if she said that thought had not crossed her mind. At least now she knows she was right to worry about it.
“Will you tell me?” Tilda asks.
“No,” Sigrid tells her. “Maybe someday, Tilda. But if I tell you now...”
Tilda slides across the mattress under the heavy coverlet and wraps herself around her sister, as they used to do when the nights were cold.
“I’d be scared too,” she says. “Even if it was Kili, and I knew he was a merry sort.”
Sigrid’s reply sticks in her throat, but Tilda doesn’t notice or care. Instead she burrows in even closer, and they fall asleep as they had done when they were children of the Lake, not Ladies of Dale.
+++
Present Day
Sigrid escapes to the bath as soon as she is sure the fire will consume the sheet in its entirety. Part of her is ashamed at the waste, surely there wasn’t that much blood, and she might have cleaned it without anyone knowing, but more of her is relieved that it is gone, and gone without Fili seeing it. That he might come into the bath occurs to her, but once she is in the hot water she cannot make herself rush. He does not join her, but they take breakfast together. He tells her that he has duties to attend to, but will return as soon as possible. He does not mention the sheet.
“Will you be all right for the day?” he asks, pulling his ceremonial daggers to straighten the belt he sheathes them in.
“Yes,” she assures him. “I have to oversee the arrangement of my things, and I would like to learn how the Mountain operates as soon as possible.”
“My mother will help you, until you have your own ladies,” Fili says. According to the marriage contract, Sigrid is entitled to her own household, but she must staff it mostly with dwarves.
“Thank you,” she says.
He looks like he wants to say something more, and she wonders if she ought to kiss him, but then he is gone. They will tease him today, she is sure of it, newly wedded and newly bedded as he is. She tries not to think about it.
Breakfast is cleared away, and Dis arrives to help her organize her rooms. Sigrid spends the day doing familiar things, if on a grander scale than she is used to, and by the time dinner arrives, with Fili right behind it, she is feeling almost at home. The meal is a repeat of breakfast, polite and nearly strained, and then they retire to sit by the fireplace until the inevitable can no longer be put off.
+++
Fili is reading correspondences that he might have read during the day, except he saved them in case the evening became awkward. The fire crackles merrily, the only sound. Sigrid’s attention is on her lap, where her hoop rests. She stitches efficiently, and he tries his best not to think about how deft her fingers must be.
“What are you making?” he asks, before he does something unbearably stupid.
“It’s nothing, really,” she says, but passes the hoop over anyway. “Growing up, I was always sewing at night, with Bain being all elbows and knees, and Tilda growing faster than I could hem her dresses. After the dragon, mending was work for the maids, and I had to find something else. We didn’t do much embroidery before, there’s no real call for it, but it keeps me from being idle.”
“It’s beautiful,” he says, and means it. She’s stitched the Mountain, all greys and greens. Below it is Fili’s crest, and above is the outline of hers.
“It’s a handkerchief,” Sigrid says.
“When you cross the world with a Hobbit, you learn the value of a good handkerchief,” he says, smiling as he hands it back. She smiles too, and he counts it as a victory.
“Most dwarves have a night-craft, like your sewing,” Fili says.
“A night-craft?” she asks.
“Well, we’ve got our main crafts, which is how we make our way in the world,” he explains. “Mine used to be jewelry making, like Kili, but now I spend my days at politics.”
“You don’t like it?” she asks.
“It’s different, is all,” he tells her. “I miss making things, you see.”
“I do,” she says, looking up from her stitches.
“Anyway, in the evening, we do other things. More home-like, I suppose,” he continues. “Kili fletches arrows, for example.”
“What do you do?” she asks. She sets the hoop aside, interest unfeigned.
“It’s easier to show you,” he says, and stands up.
He goes to his dressing room, and opens the worn case at the bottom of one of his wardrobes. He’d lost his travel violin to the goblin caves, of course, but this one had been carried to Erebor by his mother, over safer roads. There were better made ones in the hoard, but Fili would not trade. It would be like giving away an old friend.
Sigrid’s face lights up when he returns, and he feels like that alone has made the whole evening worthwhile.
“Not the most practical craft for a group of nomads,” he admits, “but I love it. Shall I play milady a tune?”
“Please,” she says.
She does not know the drinking songs from Ered Luin, of course, but he plays them for her anyway. He sings the less bawdy ones, and she claps her hands in time and turns a most appealing shade of pink. Without thinking, he plays the Misty Mountain song, and sings the old words he was raised with, not the new ones written in times of gladness.
“I had not heard that version,” she says, when he is done.
“It does us good to remember,” he tells her, and then begins to play jauntier tunes again, though once again they cannot dance.
She falls asleep with the firelight on her face, and a smile on her lips. He tucks her carefully into their bed, and crawls in on the other side, as far from her as he can manage, even though he wants nothing more than to dance with her, and fall, breathless, into the sheets at last.
It takes him a very long time to fall asleep.
+++
Chapter 3
