"What of you, Melcirial?" Aleia asked the young elflady. "What is your story? Let us hear it!" But the hobbit's promptings seemed to fall on deaf ears, as though the elf had vanished altogether into some distant inner space. Her eyes had a faraway look to them as though she was wandering around somewhere in the dreamtime.
How Elven of her! thought Benia. Looking around the table, she saw that her other companions seemed relaxed and happy: Aleia with her tea, and Gilly sinking lower and lower into her armchair. Benia smiled to herself. She felt happy and comfortable, too, for a change. She spent altogether too much time hiking rainsoaked across empty meadows or hiding in hedgerows, waiting fearfully for suspicious bands of cloaked men to gallop past and leave her in peace. In fact, she felt almost festive, in spite of her earlier worries about the red stone and the large number of Rohirrim descending on the inn. She reached into her skirt pocket and took out a small cloth pouch.
"Let's have a song!" she said merrily. She opened the little pouch and took out two pairs of small brass cymbals, which she attached loosely to the thumbs and middle fingers of her tattooed hands. Keeping a steady ting-ting-tek-a-tek-ting-tek-a-tek beat going with the cymbals, she began to sing. Her voice was low and sweet, and even though the words were in her mother's desert dialect, all who heard her were suddenly struck with visions of a bright sun and blowing sand dunes, oasis palm trees, and wide open grasslands. When she finished th elast verse, she lowered the little cymbals and smiled around the table. The elflady was still in her own world, but Aleia was watching her with bright-eyed interest, clearly curious about the little cymbals. Gilly, on the other hand, seemed to have dropped off to sleep, holding her still unopened letter loosely in her lap.
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