[piosenniel]

Ealasaid's character - Benia

NAME: Benia Nightshade

AGE: 30

RACE: Men. Her father is from Bree; her mother, from Harad.

GENDER: Female

WEAPONS: A dagger and her father's sword.

APPEARANCE: Benia is about 5'7" with a slim, athletic build. She has an olive complexion. Her raven black hair is thick and straight, falling almost to her knees. She usually wears it in a single plait down her back. She is very beautiful in an exotic kind of way, with an oval face and large, long-lashed eyes of a dark amber color. She lines her eyes in kohl. The only jewelry she wears are silver dangling earrings, and a wide silver band on the middle finger of her left hand. A fine silver chain runs from her left earring across her cheekbone to a small stud in her left nostril. Tiny silver medallions hang, sparkling, from the chain.
Her palms and inner wrists (up to about 3" above her hand) are intricately tattooed with floral patterns and clan markings that identify her as a member of the Rain Clan of the Painted Sand tribe from the Haradrim desert. Usually, when she travels, she wears soft leather gauntlets to conceal the tattoos.
Basically a nomad, she doesn't own a wide assortment of clothes, only a cloak and hood, a couple of dresses (with requisite underclothes, of course), and a couple of veils, which she wears oftentimes when she travels, or when she wishes to hide from the world. Her clothes are all of the soft browns and greens of the forest. (She likes bright vibrant colors, but finds the earthtones more practical for all the travel she does.)

PERSONALITY: Benia is a courageous, yet gentle and caring woman. She is calm, confident, and practical, yet would willingly sacrifice her life if she thought it would save the life of another. She is fiercely loyal to her few friends and the remains of her mother's clan. When it concerns her own safety, she is more apt to flee from her enemies than to confront them, but if another's safety is in question, she will do whatever needs to be done in order to save or protect him/her.
She is shy around strangers, but, once her guard is down, likes a laugh and a good tale almost as much as the average hobbit. She has a beautiful singing voice and likes to sing, but rarely gets the opportunity. She is a skilled dancer after the fashion of Haradrim women, but does not know any of the dances done by the other peoples of Middle Earth.

STRENGTHS: Benia's greatest strengths are her courage and her generosity of spirit. She knows how to handle her father's sword, but only uses it in self-defense. (She is not a warrior or shield maiden by any stretch of the imagination.)

WEAKNESSES: She has a tendency to let her guard down sometimes at the wrong moments. Operating largely on instinct, she has also been known to be a little too quick to place her trust in strangers. Usually this is not a problem as she is usually right about people, but on occasion she has been wrong and ended up putting herself in grave danger.

HISTORY: Benia's mother came from the Rain clan of the Painted Sand tribe, a nomadic tribe of the Haradrim desert. They were warriors and horsemen, like the Rohirrim, but their horses were small and fast, better built to withstand the heat of the desert. Painted Sand was once a large and powerful tribe, but when they refused to fight on the side of Sauron in the War of the Ring, the entire clan was pretty much wiped out. To Benia's knowledge, only a handful of aunts and distant cousins remain. There may be others & she is always on the lookout for them. Because their lives are still in danger from those who followed Sauron, the tattered remnants of her tribe remain on the run, scattered throughout Middle Earth. Some of them remain in contact with one another by leaving obscure messages in predecided locations, but others are simply lost.

Benia's mother, Benia the Fair, left the desert with her parents and four of her brothers many years prior to the start of the War, but there was already a gathering of forces moving toward Mordor. They tried to escape north into Gondor and Rohan, but were pursued by orcs and hostile tribesmen. Her parents and one of her brothers were killed before reaching Harad's border. She and her other three brothers made it as far as Rohan, where they we captured by a Rohirrim horse patrol. Jack Nightshade, originally a Bree-man who had migrated to Rohan in search of adventure, was one of her captors. He and two others were given the chore of escorting the prisoners back to the city. By the time they arrived at Edoras, he and the desert lady had fallen in love. She remained a prisoner of the Mark for a brief time until her story was heard and verified, then she and her brothers were released. Her brothers swore their allegiance to Rohan and eventually found service as riders and scouts. Benia the Fair married Jack Nightshade and tried to make a home for the two of them in Rohan.

Jack became a close friend of Benia the Fair's brothers, often riding with them on patrols. Eventually, the brothers won permission to travel back to the desert to seek word on their kinsmen. Jack was granted permission to accompany them and, against his better judgment, was swayed by his wife's pleas and allowed her to accompany them as well. It was only after they had travelled a goodly distance toward Harad that it was discovered that Benia the Fair was pregnant. They had gone too far to send her back, so they continued on and Benia's daughter, Benia Nightshade, was born in the desert of her kinsmen. When the company finally reached the far savannahs, the ancestral base of the Painted Sand clan, there was no one left, just slaughtered horses and skeletons bleaching in the sun. They stayed there in hiding until the Benias were strong enough, then began the journey back to Rohan.

On the way back, they were attacked by orcs. The company was split in the fighting. Jack and his wife and daughter fled back into the desert. No one knew what became of the brothers. The Nightshades stayed in the desert, getting by as best they could until little Benia turned seven. Then Jack decided it was time to return to Rohan. This time they made it back, but things had changed. Jack was seen as a deserter and imprisoned. He managed to escape and, taking his little family with him, fled again. This time, they went North to Bree and his ancestral home. There, the Nightshade family took them in. They managed to stay there in peace and contentment for a while, but by the time little Benia reached her teens, rumors of trouble began to haunt them again. Mysterious strangers had been coming up the Greenway to Bree, asking about desert people and describing little Benia and her mother. It was clear that they meant them ill. Jack decided it was time to run again.

He bundled up his wife and now teenaged daughter, taking the unlikely road west toward The Shire. The strangers were in hot pursuit and nearly overtook them but for the brave interference of a hobbit called Gilly Burrows (now Banks), who at great peril to herself and her family, took it upon herself first to conceal the three of them and later to help them escape.

The three Nightshades did manage to escape, but were not so lucky the next time. They were overtaken by bounty hunters a short while later in some wild and lonely spot. Benia the Fair was killed and Jack was badly wounded. Little Benia remained unharmed only because she had been dawdling away from the camp when the tragedy struck. Carefully, she sheltered and tended to her father until he was well enough to travel. As soon as he had regained enough strength, they returned to his family in Bree, where he completed his convalescence. As soon as he was able, he took his daughter and the two of them vanished into the wilderness, never again attempting to call anyplace home for long.

Jack was heartbroken at the loss of Benia the Fair and never quite recovered from it. Eventually, he took to drink and was killed in a tavern brawl. Benia Nightshade was left on her own. She continued to travel, eventually working her way south again to the desert where she was able to locate a few surviving members of her clan, who tattooed her hands and finished teaching her the ways of the desert. Now she spends the majority of her time traveling from place to place, looking for her scattered kinsmen, helping them where she can and trying to assist in the rescues of those who are still imprisoned. She has never married, and, though she keeps in contact with her father's family in Bree, the connection is rather tenuous. Even though she is Jack's daughter, they still view her as a foreigner and help her on occasion only out of loyalty to her father's memory. They blame her and her mother for Jack's death.

She arrives at the Forsaken Inn as the result of a desire to see Gilly. Banned from the Shire (along with all the other Big People) by order of King Elessar, she sent a message to Bywater asking Gilly to meet her at the inn. She didn't go as far as Bree because of the tense nature of her relations with her father's family. The Nightshades are a big family, & she knew she could not be there unbeknownst to them.
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Ealasaid's post for Benia

Bound wrist and ankle, Benia Nightshade lay in the darkness of the abandoned cellar. Despite the skilled healing efforts of the two elves back at the inn, her sprained ankle throbbed under the tightness of the rope. Kaldir, the bounty hunter who had seized her out of her bed at the inn, had been gone for hours. She had already begun to wonder if he was ever going to return. Half of her mind hoped that he would. She would hate to starve to death, alone and forgotten, in the empty cellar. The other half of her mind hoped never to lay eyes on him again. She knew he meant to kill her. Why he had not done so already was a mystery to her.

Thinking back, she remembered how he had brought her to the cellar and dumped her rather unceremoniously on to the dirt floor. From there he had dragged her over to a wooden chopping block, where an axe already waited, but, instead of chopping off her head or hands as she had expected him to do, he had simply given the tribal tattoos on her hands a long stare in the flickering candlelight. Then, inexplicably, he had kissed each of her palms and left, taking the axe with him. She had not seen him since. The candle he had lit when they arrived in the cellar had burned out hours ago. Now, whether he came back or not, Benia had the feeling that she had come to the end of her life. Either way, she was waiting to die. Whether the end came quickly or slowly seemed to be all there was left to determine. The ropes that bound her were strong and the knots, like iron. She knew there would be no wriggling loose.

Shifting her legs to a slightly more comfortable position, Benia pondered the last several days of her life, thinking about the mistakes she had made. The trip to the Forsaken Inn had been a foolish and sentimental thing to do in the first place, and, since arriving there, she had done nothing right or sensible. Actually, in retrospect, she realized she had thrown caution to the wind nearly from the moment she had first crossed the inn's threshold. With that in mind, she had to admit that it was no surprise to find herself in her current predicament.

The worst part of the whole scenario was that she had not only endangered herself, but involved her friend Gilly, as well, which was - to her mind - unforgivable. Benia sighed. She hoped desperately that Gilly was well on her way back toward Bywater and safety by now, not hanging about inviting more trouble. She blamed herself for Gilly's involvement. If she had just not written that letter inviting Gilly to meet her there at the inn, none of this would have happened. Gilly would be safe at home with her family in Bywater, and Benia, herself, would be going about her own business miles away from the inn. There would have been no ill-fated songs, no sprained ankle, and, most of all, no bounty hunter.

She was sure the song was what had summoned the bounty hunter out of the wilds, like a genie from a bottle. She had made the mistake of letting herself get too comfortable in the warmth of the inn's common room and, not only bursting into song, but bursting into song in the most conspicuous way imaginable... in the language of her own nearly extinct Haradrim tribe, complete with finger cymbals. In the darkness, Benia blushed from her own foolishness. She might as well have just burst into flame. It had been no coincidence that the bounty hunter had appeared the very next day. She was sure of it.

The sprained ankle, too, was as much her own fault as anything else. If she had just watched where she was going instead of worrying so much about where the bounty hunter was, she would have seen the pewter tankard left on the stairs. As if that wasn’t enough, she had pretty much sealed her own fate by sending the kind Ranger, Hanasian, who had helped her after her fall on the stairs, on that ridiculous errand to Bree. In all reality, he had been her only protection. As soon as he had gone, the bounty hunter had made his move and the next thing Benia knew, she lay tied in an empty cellar, waiting to die.

She sighed again and was just closing her eyes to try to sleep when the sound of a firm step on the floor over her head jolted her awake. She struggled into a sitting position and edged away as best she could from the narrow staircase that led upward to the abandoned blacksmith’s shop. There was a click and a slide of a bolt, followed by the creak of stiff hinges as the trap door opened over her head. Straining to see through the darkness, she could barely make out the tall shape of the bounty hunter descending the stairs. He carried a small bundle which he set down beside her. A few seconds later, a fresh candle flickered to life. Benia’s amber eyes struggled to adjust to the light as the bounty hunter knelt beside her and untied her wrists. When he had finished, he moved away to take a seat on the stairs.

He nodded toward the bundle he had left on the floor beside her. “I suggest you eat,” he said quietly.

Startled, Benia did as she was told and reached for the bundle. She had not eaten in over twenty-four hours, but it was not until she smelled the rich aroma of Aldarida Boffin’s cooking that she realized she was famished. Even so, she hesitated before taking even the first bite. She turned a curious gaze toward the bounty hunter, who only smiled his peculiar one-sided smile, the candlelight casting his scarred features into sharp planes of dark and light.

“It’s not poisoned if that’s what you’re thinking,” he told her, guessing her unspoken question. “I suggest you eat it.”

Benia did as she was told. Even though it was just a cold supper of whole grain bread and cold chicken, she couldn’t remember when any food had ever tasted so good. Watching Kaldir from the corner of her eyes as she ate, she saw that he was simply waiting for her to finish. His sword remained sheathed at his side and there was no sign of an axe. Even the chopping block lay where he had left it. Finally, she gathered her courage to speak.

“If you mean to kill me,” she asked. “Why do you bring me a meal?”

“Perhaps I don’t mean to kill you just yet.” Seeing that she was finished, he rose from his perch on the stairs and gathered the empty crockery back into the bundle. “You’ll need your strength. Can you ride?”

Benia nodded.

Kaldir did not answer immediately, but picked up the rope and retied her wrists, even tighter it seemed than before. “Then we leave on the morrow,” he said at last, casting barely a glance at her bare feet that lay partly visible under the hem of her dress. Without any further explanation, he took up the bundle of now-empty crockery and departed back up the stairs.

Alone in the candlelight, Benia listened as the trap door creaked shut and the outside bolt fell into place with a decisive click.