Work was harder to find in Bree than she had originally thought. In hindsight, she should have known. The people of Archet still didn’t fully trust her family even after living there for sixteen years, so why should the town of Bree offer work to a shifty vagabond whom they know nothing about?
She was getting desperate. She would take any work she could find at this point. She spent some of her precious time during the day lurking at the Prancing Pony, for Barliman had given her odd jobs to do, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep her afloat for long. Faerveldis knew how people got to talking in the tavern, and she only hoped that she would be able to catch a chance at fortune.
But as she sipped listlessly on the weak ale, she knew that was unlikely. The inn was quiet, save for a band of rowdy dwarves that had stumbled in. Judging from their (loud) conversation, she knew they were from Ered Luin, and traveling to the Misty Mountains. They cast her askew glances from the bar, but she ignored them from her spot, which was leaning against a wooden beam not far from the door. Faerveldis prayed silently that they did not engage with her - the combination of her hauberk and cloak disguised her body enough to pass as masculine, but she was having trouble getting her voice to sound right. She sounded more like a young boy with a cold than she did a convincing man.
Just as she was thinking these thoughts, a Man approached her from the side. She tensed up, her grip tightening on her mug of ale. The last thing she wanted was to speak and be spoken to. The man was wearing a hood as well, but she could make out some of his face in the firelight. His skin was tan like southerners bore, and she could make out the scrappings of facial hair as she turned to face him. That was all she could tell in the few seconds before he spoke.
“Are you bandit, or friend?” He asked, and Faerveldis stopped in surprise as he had asked her the question in Sindarin, the tongue of the elves. Many Gondorians knew the language, herself included, but it had been many years since she had spoken in that tongue.
“....Neither,” she eventually replied in kind. “Traveler,” was all she could get out in her limited memory of the language, not to mention the difficulty from trying to mask her voice as masculine. That didn’t seem to be enough for the man, who continued, but thankfully in the western tongue.
“I hope not a bandit, for I don’t think too kindly of thieves what steal from a house long thought perished,” he growls in what she recognized immediately as a Southern accent. It took Faerveldis for a long moment to understand what he could mean.
The sheath. It bears the crest of the House of Galunin.
Faerveldis never imagined someone would recognize it, certainly not all the way out in Bree. She shifted uncomfortably, trying to think of how to respond.
“My business is my business,” she insisted in her forced, gruff voice.
There was a brief standoff between the pair, with a few more attempts at prying on the stranger’s part and a few more bluffs on hers to try to get him to back off, but he was relentless. He finally dropped the line that would end the conversation in its tracks.
“I, for one, would not be caught wearing the crest of such casualty,” he says bluntly, before leaving behind his mug. He left behind also her in a confused daze, wondering what he could have meant, before confusion turned to indignation. What did he know about the crest that she didn’t?
“Hey! Who do you think you are?!” She snapped just as he left the tavern. Faerveldis immediately gave chase.
