TA 2945

Tap, tap, tap.

"My lady?"

"Oh. Hm? What?"

Torwald, the head cook, looks at me strangely as the tapping continues and I realise that it is the sound of my fingernails against the wood of the table. I have been thinking of Fili's hand that grazed my waist, then dragged along my back, the last time we passed each other when I was leaving Erebor after yet another meeting. I look at the tall, fat, grey haired man and smile.

"Yes, Torwald?"

"I said, we have a new addition to the staff."

"Right. Well, if you think it's needed, then that's your decision. But be mindful of the finances, would you?"

Torwald is a good cook, but he seems to think we need to live better than we do. He served the master in Laketown, which I assume is where he got such ideas into his head, but I've had to have stern words with him more than once. He seems to think that a town so close to the Lake should dine on meat every night, which is ridiculous. Thankfully my words over the last three years have gotten through his rather thick head, and we now only get meat brought in twice a week.

We do not need to be mindful of our finances, truth be told, but I much prefer to hoard than to dish out freely. I can thank my upbringing for that. It has served us well since I have taken over the books and ledgers; Da tried in the beginning, but we almost ran out of our stores of grain so it became my task to watch over the financial state of the city.

"Yes, of course," Torwald says, drawing my attention back to him. He's being too polite, which makes my mouth screw up as I examine his pink cheeks. I almost turn to Da, who is sitting on the chair beside me, papers spread out in front of him, but I turn back around to the cook when I see Da muttering to himself, his finger following the numbers down the page. Not even I will be able to bring him out the depth of concentration that he seems to need to look at grain records.

We are in the main hall and it is just after lunchtime. Da and I have a habit of sitting in the hall and doing our work together – the study works well, but we spent years sitting at a family table in our old home, and we haven't been able to break the practice yet.

"What is it, Torwald?" I ask him shrewdly.

Tolward looks at Da, who doesn't raise his head. I know it is not on purpose, but I raise my eyebrows at the old man pointedly: he'll have to deal with me.

"Well…" he stammers. "It's a woman of trade."

"Of trade?" I begin to shake my head. "We have you, plus your assistants. Why do we need someone who has a trade? They will cost more. Find someone else." Then I think for a moment. "What is she even meant to be doing?"

Torwald somehow finds the courage to look me in the eye and I can see that he is excited about this mysterious tradeswoman. "She's a confectioner!" he announces. I think he'd click his heels together if he wasn't a man of one and sixty, or fat enough that the entirety of my family could fit into one of his pant legs.

"A confectioner? What does that even mean?" Tilda asks, having come up beside me, chewing on the end of a quill, obviously on a break from her lessons.

I hear the clearing of a throat, then a woman steps out from behind Torwald. At first I don't understand how she has managed to stand there for so long and not be noticed, but I lose my train of thought because she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

She has eyes as black as the lake at night, and hair that somehow manages to be even darker. Her skin is a colour that I have never seen in my life – I can't decide if it's gold, or brown, or both. She is small, I realise, which is how she fit easily behind Tolward's frame; her limbs are long and slim, her body curved in way that I haven't seen an older woman's be because there is no heaviness to it – she has never had children. But she can't be that old – for a minute, I forget myself and lean forward to see that her tanned, golden face is smooth, almost wrinkle free except for laugh lines. Her eyes are wide, lashes long, and topped by eyebrows that are thin and arched. I almost raise a finger to my own, which are thicker and not half as attractive. How can she make even her eyebrows attractive, I want to ask.

She turns her head to look right at me and I flinch at the directness of her gaze. Then she brushes a lock of wavy hair away from her forehead and the spell is broken, and I continue with my examination. She is wearing a dark brown dress, exceedingly plain but it does her no end of favours; even Talward is having trouble keeping his eyes away from the line of her waist. Her hair is braided, but she must have endless amounts of it because more wisps around her face each time she moves.

The only thing I can hear in the hall is Da whispering under his breath – not even the lack of sound that occurs as all of the male occupants in the hall stop in their tracks to gawk at this woman is enough to make him look up from the page.

The woman looks as if she has no idea what effect she has on any of us, for she shifts on her feet, which only draws more eyes to her as her hip juts to the side. I make a mental note to practice such a movement in front of the mirror later.

"Ah…" Torwald says in a strangled voice. "Princess Sigrid, let me introduce you to Anne of Dorwinion. The new confectioner."

The woman walks towards where I am sitting and sinks into a graceful curtsy. Wherever did she learn that? The last time a woman curtsied to me, she fell over on her backside. We don't do things like that in Dale.

"She came by way of Minas Tirith," Torwald says in an important voice. Well, that explains it then.

Anne is silent, and I begin to think she is mute until I understand that she is waiting for me to address her, first. Blimey, is she going to act like this all of the time? How is she going to do my eyebrows if she's going to act like she's got no tongue?

"Hello," I say plainly. Her eyes widen, perhaps she was expecting a 'how do you do' or 'good day to you'.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, my lady Princess," she says. If a woman could purr, that is what her voice would sound like. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a maid reach over and shut the mouth of a server boy that has dropped open at the sound that comes out of her pink lips.

Three words is a record for me: my lady Princess. I am princess, or Sigrid, or my girl (Da) or my lady, if I must be. Sometimes, to my pleasure, I am even a lass.

"Yes, alright," I beam and wave a hand.

I see how she blinks at my friendliness, then she breaks out into a wide, honest smile. Her teeth look like pearls of white. Strangely, I have not felt even one tug of envy; I have decided instead that I like this woman. I cross my legs, wondering why I have come to such a conclusion, when she opens her mouth again.

"A confectioner, my ladies," she says to Tilda and I, "is a cook who specializes in the sweeter side of things. I have studied for many years…"

Has she? Many years? I look at her again. She doesn't look much older than me. I learn later that she is nine and twenty, her thirtieth naming day due at the end of autumn.

"…and I have held the position in both Dorwinion and Minas Tirith."

"Where?" I ask bluntly, almost giggling when she grins. She is obviously enjoying my frankness.

"The Lord of Dorwinion's court, then a year of extra training in Dol Amroth, then the Steward's court," Anne says seamlessly, then blinks. "Oh, and a year in the household of Prince Thengel of Rohan."

Such places and people do not actually mean anything at all to me, but if Torwald is going to be spending a tradeperson's wages on this woman, then I want to at least know a bit of her history.

I am still wondering why I think I will like her, but then her next words convince me that she and I are going to be very, very good friends. "I'll make you up a plate," she says firmly, without any invitation from me. I like someone who treats me as if I do not need to be coddled.

And she does make a plate.

At the evening meal, when we are dining together in our private quarters, a tray comes to us. It is covered in deep blue silk and sits in the middle of our table, until Da looks up from his fish and finally sees it.

"What's that?" he asks, puzzled at the addition to our table.

I turn my head to him, my eyes fit to bust. "Are you jesting, Da?"

"About what?" he raises an eyebrow, then scratches his beard. I wonder for a second if Fili scratches his beard, I've never seen him do it. Then I think, what would it feel like if I scratched his beard? Then I shake my head to clear my thoughts.

"Da, you can't be that deaf!" Tilda cries and breaks off into giggles.

"He must be," I agree with another shake of my head. "We have a new addition to the staff. A confectioner."

"A what?" Da's lip curls, like it does when he's bewildered.

"We went through this after lunch. You were there," I remind him. He continues to look baffled, so I look instead to the tray. Might as well give it a try, I decide, so I untie the white string and pull off the silk.

"Oh," Tilda breathes in excitement. I can't even pay attention to how Bain's fingers automatically reach onto the plate, nor can I be bothered to raise my eyebrows at Da, who has chosen this moment to whistle like he's back on the barge.

"Well then," Da pronounces.

Well then, indeed. On the tray in the middle of our table are the most delectable things I've seen in my life. Little figures of flowers that we discover are edible, sweet biscuits covered in fresh jam, fruit that has been boiled down and added to until it sits in neat little squares of conserve, and little nuts that are encrusted in sugar that is all different colours, but all taste delightfully sweet. Anne has even put a small bowl of candied raisins on the tray, topped with little curls of something brown that I remember has a name starting with "ch", though for the life of me I can't think of the rest of it.

It is all so decadent, so indulgent and so pleasurable, that I can't believe it's on the table in Dale, of all places.

"How long's she staying?" Bain asks with a mouthful of sweets. I can see the sugar around his lips glistening in the candlelight. There is a life to our table that I have not felt in years.

"As long as she wants," I decide. If I were a witch, I'd cackle with glee. But I'm a princess now, so I rub my hands together instead and give a whoop of joy before diving into the tray again.

Anne wins us all over, one by one. She gives Bain free reign in her little kitchen, and she becomes the only friend I have in Dale. How that happened, I'm still not completely sure, as one minute she was curtsying again and the next I was stirring a huge pot of bubbling fruit, quite clumsily as we were both doubled over with laughter.

I tell her about Fili. Or rather, I tell her that there's a blonde haired man (I have decided to refer to him as a man, because he is almost as tall as me) from another city who has caught my interest. She says nothing, but I notice that when I turn to go, she's made up a little bag of dried rose petals.

"Here," she says with a sly smile. I can easily hear the slight accent in her voice, now that we have talked more than once. "Hang it on the belt of your dress the next time you think you might see him."

I bow my head and feel my blush. That is how she won me over.

Tilda is another story. Like me, she has found that the friends that she had in Laketown are suddenly too busy to sit with her, now that she is technically royalty. But it is worse for my little sister; they ignore her, rather than politely decline her invitations, like they do for me. They are mean to her; cruel, even.

I walk down to the market one day, and pause. Anne and Tilda are in front of me. Anne's hands are linked behind her back, and she is leaning down, listening intently to whatever Tilda is saying. They have stopped in front of a stall displaying new toys from Erebor.

Suddenly, a group of girls advance and jump in the puddle next to my sister, left over from the summer rain the night before. My sister's skirt is drenched. Anne is wet from her chest to the hem of her dress.

But they do not stop there. They crowd around Tilda, having wormed past Anne until they are surrounding the girl that slept with me until only last year. I cannot hear what they are saying to her, but it is enough to make her cheeks redden and angry tears pool in her eyes. I feel steam rushing through my body until I swear that it might come out of my ears, and I ball my fists and begin to storm towards them.

Anne gets there first. She doesn't care that the girls are fifteen years younger than her, she just elbows through them, sending half of them flying until they're thumped in the puddle. She turns to the ringleader, an annoyingly beautiful red haired girl with freckles and green, catty eyes, whose backside is presently sitting in the dirty brown puddle, and she kneels down in front of her, not caring for a second that she is kneeling in the water.

She says something, and drives her point home by poking the girl's chest with one long finger – I want to clap when I see how she leaves it there for a moment longer than might be normal, as if she might just claw into the girl then and there. I can't hear what Anne says, but I see the dwarf behind the stall smirk, and Tilda beams. Anne's black eyes are flaming with anger and the girl wisely jumps up, turns on her heel and runs, soon followed by the rest of the group.

Anne stands and looks around her. Everyone is quiet and eyeing Tilda with sympathy. Tilda hates sympathy. Then Anne spots me. She grabs Tilda's hand and marches purposefully back up the hill, takes my hand, too, and then we are all striding to the royal house under a red haze of fury.

Later, she warms a heavily watered wine and spices it with cinnamon. We girls, we three, sit in front of the fire in the main hall until the moon is shining brightly in the night sky.

Anne leaves with a kiss to Tilda's hair.

"What did she say to them?" I ask my sister, when Anne has disappeared through the door to the servant's side of the hall.

Tilda grins widely. I wait while she finishes chewing on a piece of honey cake, and wonder what I would have said. 'I'll box your ears'? No. 'I'll tell your parents'. Definitely not. 'I'll whack your backsides'? Possibly.

"She said," Tilda cleared her throat, and I can see by the way her eyes are shining that she is half in love with Anne already, "that if they spoke to me again, she'd scratch their eyes out."

Oh. Well, then. I feel a giggle rising, and then we're both laughing, holding onto each other, in awe of this woman who defends us like she is a lioness and we are her cubs. Except, she does not treat us like cubs. No, we are lionesses too.

And that is how Tilda is not just won over, but bowled over, until she loves Anne so fiercely that they are as thick as thieves.

Da is another story.

Some months later, Da and I are sitting in the hall again, with papers around us. We are going over the stocks, getting ready for winter. We want to be sure that this will be the easiest yet – that more animals will survive. More shelters have been built, and thanks to the good harvest from last year, we have had more than enough funds to hire some more bodies to watch over the livestock.

We are engrossed in the task, but Da is soon staring off into the distance. I don't ask him why – I've learnt to recognize the signs, over the years. Signs that he is thinking of Mum. I don't even try to put a comforting hand on his arm anymore, for he is so lost in his memories that he wouldn't even notice.

But then something changes.

I can hear a familiar sound that makes me grin despite the boring task at hand. All of the males in the hall stop whatever they were doing (whatever do they do, anyway? They just seem to stand around, waiting for this very moment) and a hush descends over us all. Da is confused. He leans towards me and says: "Did I just hear a cat in here?"

Da has still not noticed Anne. In all of these months, she's walked past him a dozen times but he's either had his head in a stack of papers, or is doing something or other that means he has somehow missed that a beautiful woman has been eyeing him off. I've seen her do it myself, even though she would deny it to her last breath – with the way she watches him sometimes, I think that she's categorized and filed him, the way I might do for a new cow. Though frankly the way I assess a cow, and the way she assesses Da, is probably a bit different.

Tilda comes out first. She runs, flat out, through the door that leads to the servant's quarters and Anne's little kitchen. Her boots pound on the wooden floor and she skids with a squeak as she makes a sharp turn, hoping to evade her pursuer. Da watches with interest for once, when he sees that Tilda is holding a little figure of sugar high in the air.

Then we hear it again. A low growl sounds from behind the door, and Tilda squeals. Anne bursts out through the door, her eyes narrowed and her long fingers curled like claws, and stalks towards her prey with the theatrics that Tilda adores. Da drops the paper that he's holding and his eyes go wide, the pupils moving from side to side in a movement that matches the rhythm of the sway of her hips.

She has no idea that she does it, but she hisses and at the same time, her long hair swishes from side to side. It doesn't help that half has escaped a loose braid. She prowls over to Tilda, who is cornered between some tables, and bends her body until she truly looks like a cat, stalking towards a mouse. Tilda gives a hoot of laughter, then manages to scoot under Anne's legs and she is off again, running back through the hall to the servant's door.

Anne throws her head back and laughs, then claps her hands together. This is enough to make Da make a strange sound in his throat. I'm not surprised – I've heard it more than a handful of times from various males in here. One of them once said that Anne could prowl her way into his bed and he wouldn't kick her out; I pretended not to hear, but hear I did. I'll have to remind myself to tell her to tone it down when she picks up her skirts, giving us all a view of bare ankles, and runs right after Tilda, both of them breathless.

When the door slams shut and the sound of their laughter has died down, I turn to Da. He's still watching the place where she last was.

"Who…?" he manages to say.

"Anne," I supply cheerfully. "Our confectioner."

"That is the confectioner?"

"Aye." I smirk and say nothing, forcing him to ask all of the questions.

"How long…?"

"Oh, about six months now," I reply. I'm used to Da's half sentences.

"Six months?" He is incredulous, for once. Finally, he feels the same way that I do, when I wonder how he has not noticed her before.

"Why haven't you…?"

"Why haven't I told you?" I say, feeling helpful, and he nods, still watching the servant's door.

I could say a multitude of things here. I could say: 'she has been making moon eyes at you and you haven't batted an eyelid, so she gave up'. Or I could say: 'you're Da and it's simply strange to suggest a female companion for you.'

But I don't say any of those things. I don't say anything. I just shrug and grin.

The real reason that I haven't mentioned Anne to Da is that Da needs to do something by himself for a change. And also, I am hesitant to tell him the extent of our relationship. For instance, I don't particularly wish to tell him that a fortnight ago, Anne and I managed to sneak into the stables armed with two bottles of wine. When we were tippled enough, I asked her to show me how she shifts on her feet so that her hip juts out. She stared at me with her mouth hanging open, until we both shrieked with laughter, then took turns in swiveling our hips around, until I'd gotten the movement just right.

I haven't mentioned Anne to Da, because last week I went to Erebor and when I said goodbye to Fili, I had a bag of rose petals hanging from my belt that made me smell like the garden in spring. I haven't mentioned her, because after that I shifted on my feet and swayed my hip ever so slightly, and Fili's eyes followed my action and they darkened so much that when he looked back at me again, they were black instead of blue and I was feeling that same, strange tingling in my belly that started all of this in the first place.

.

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And here we have Anne. At this point, reading Kings and Sweetmeats will have been beneficial, in terms of why she has a whole chapter in this story.

Borys - yep! Haha.

Casema - It's a guilty pleasure, to write this, that's for sure.

Eryndil - I can't either. Plus there's a good ten years or so between her and Anne, so definitely a bit of a difference in terms of how much importance one might place on ogling depending on age ;)

Hannew - I'm going to give explaining that a go in this little story. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that I definitely think it is possible, but I'll expand on my reasons a bit later.