Benia had been waiting at the bar to place her drink order for only a short while when another elf approached and interrupted the ongoing conversation between the bar mistress, the Ranger, and the other elf to place his own drink order. Observing, she raised one black eyebrow.
"Ah!" she reminded herself. "One must speak out in a tavern or forever go thirsty!"
Among her mother's people, it was considered rude for a newcomer to speak first without having been acknowledged or invited to speak by another. The custom had been well-ingrained in her, and, not being around other people much, she had to remind herself that not everyone had the same customs. Behind the veil, a smiled danced on the corners of her lips. She might have stood there all night!
In the attempt to get Aman's attention without disrupting the flow of her conversation with the others, Benia raised her hand, forgetting that she had already removed her gloves. In doing so, she exposed the intricately tattooed palm of a nomadic tribeswoman from the deserts beyond Harad. Quickly, she closed her hand and lowered it again, cutting a quick glance at Aman and her companions to see how they had reacted, if indeed they had even noticed. It did not seem to her that they had. She breathed a sigh of relief. Generally, her kind were regarded with suspicion in Middle Earth as the majority of her people had fought on the side of Sauron in the War of the Ring. Her own clan, the Painted Sand clan, had refused and been hunted nearly to extinction as a result. Once numbering in the hundreds, her clan had been reduced to a mere handful of uncles and distant cousins. The Red Eye of Mordor may have been defeated, but there were still those in the world who reamined loyal and who still desired vengeance.
She leaned forward instead, speaking through her veil. "Pardon me, lady, I am sorry to interrupt you and your friends, but I have travelled far and am in dire need of refreshment. Might I trouble you for a pint?" She had worked hard to eliminate the accent from her speech, but a small trace remained. She trusted that no one would notice that either. She was tired of trouble and sought no quarrel with anyone. All she wanted was to find the Hobbit who had rendered her a great kindness many years ago when she had been nothing more than a gangly black-haired teenager.
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