Wallace Shale's page

Elarya's tears still run down her cheeks, but the sobbing had ceased. When Regina brings her a cup of tea she takes it in both hands, and curls her legs back under the blanket.

"Thank ye. All o' ye. I- I've been a li'l lost, I guess."

She takes a sip at the tea, and then another before speaking again.

"I don't know why I kept it bottled inside fer so long. It hurt ta admit it, but it hurt more ta keep it locked away deep."

She finishes off the cup, sleep threatening to overtake her, but before she goes to bed, she asks Wallace one more question.

"Are ye gonna tell tha council 'bout this."

Wallace smiled at Elarya with a look of understanding.

"Well, I do think the council should hear about this creature you defeated, but as for the rest, I think that is your business. There's no reason the council needs to know that."

He stood then, and looked about the house. His eyes went to his sons, his wife, his daughter, then back to Elarya

"I think that we should all get some rest. It's been an exciting day."

He leaned over then, and placed a gentle kiss on the warrior girl's cheek, and began to settle in to bed.

Elarya tries to put on a smile, or at least look like she's not as unhappy as she is, but the attempt falls flat. She doesn't look directly at the man who had given her a place to stay and work to do.

"Aye, he needs to gather everything, but he can get us the things we need to do it. Forging the weapon shouldn't be too hard."

She starts cleaning up her area and looks for anything to work on while she does so. She looks at the almost finished horseshoes for a moment before deciding better of it. She looked over her work from earlier and tries to find something, anything, that she missed, but her skill was such that she hadn't.

Anything for her to do to take her mind off of things?

Wallace recognized the look on Elarya's face, one he had seen all too often before. Her skill was such that she rarely had to go over her work more than once, and unfortunately for her, it made her complete her work quickly. He knew that giving her tasks just to keep her busy were what she wanted, something to keep her focused on the here and now. Something to keep her away from her past. He also knew that it was getting harder and harder to distract her from those thoughts, especially as the seasons cooled down. She, to him, seemed like a girl with fire in her blood. She needed motion, action.

back at the smithy, Wallace works away, sweating and pounding over and over on the forge. The horseshoes are coming along, it looks like he decided to make several extras, of slightly varying sizes.
Arm to brow, he looks up as Elarya returns.
"Well girl? What news? Can the thing be done?"
He drops the closest shoe in the water with the tongs and a sizzle of steam shoots up to the top of open area.

Wallace look over at the adopted daughter he had come to care for in the time she had been with his family. Although she was careful with her emotions, he would sometimes hear her silent sadness late in the night, and after trying to comfort her once or twice he came to understand that her pride was of great import to her, so he let her be. He came to respect her stoic attitude and how she threw herself with extra zeal and great attention into the work that they both held as important.

He grinned weakly at her, seeing the false smile that she offered others, and recognized it for what it was, an honest attempt at being social. Brushing the sweat from his brow, he used the well worn tongs to stir the coals and after a few minutes poured some molten ore into a mold, preparing some fresh horseshoes for a young horse that had just become old enough to put to work.

Setting the mold aside for a moment, he turned to Elarya
"Girl, put that hammer down for a moment." He waited for her to stop and then continued, tucking one hand into the dirty work apron about his thick form.
"I have an order here from a man to the north, up the coast. I wasn't sure if I could do the job, because he had an odd request. He especially asked for a strange mix to be put in with the steel. I can't make heads or tails of this scrawl, although I wasn't about to refuse the job. Could you take this order over to that goblin? Abram told me once that the bugger speaks all number of tounges...maybe he can figure it out."

He pulls a scroll from a nearby shelf, where he keeps his tools and places it on the anvil in front of Elarya.
"This could mean a fair amount of coin for us."