• Wandering Words •

It translated, as it turned out, reasonably well to a travelling company of Dwarves.

The camp had been made the previous evening with a practiced, wordless efficiency that you'd found quietly astonishing—wood gathered, fire laid, packs stowed in a particular order that suggested long habit. You'd watched from the margins, hugging your own arms and staying out of the way of elbows and axes alike, by the time the fire was going and the smell of something cooking had begun to drift through the cool air, someone had pressed a blanket around your shoulders from behind and you'd flinched—hard, the full-body kind, the kind that wasn't a choice and spun around with your heart already in your throat.

Bofur had taken a very quick step back, both hands raised, blanket still in one of them. The expression on his face wasn't offence. It was something quieter and more careful than that.

"Easy," he'd said, in a voice you might use to settle a frightened animal. "Easy, It's only a blanket."

And then, after a beat—softer, and meaning it. "I'm sorry, lass. Should've said something first."

You'd felt the heat climb your face and looked at the ground and said "thank you" very quietly to your own feet, and he'd draped the blanket over your shoulders without touching you this time, and moved away without making anything more of it, you'd stood there with the warmth of it around you and tried to get your heartbeat back to something reasonable.

That had been last night.

This morning you'd woken early—you always woke early, some part of you that never fully switched off, always half-listening for sounds in adjacent rooms—you found the camp still mostly sleeping, grey pre-dawn light sitting low over the grass and the fire burned down to sullen orange embers. You'd sat up carefully. Looked around, counted the shapes around the fire until you'd accounted for all of them, which was a thing you did now apparently, then you'd breathed out slowly and begun to think about what needed doing.

The answer, after a quiet survey, was quite a lot, there were at least three shirts in the pile near Óin's pack that had visible damage—a torn seam along one shoulder, a button missing from another, what appeared to be a significant rent in the side of the third that someone had simply decided to live with. You'd found a small sewing kit at the bottom of the pack you'd been given—small and battered, with a card of thread in several colours and three needles stuck through a scrap of felt—you settled yourself cross-legged near what remained of the fire with the first shirt across your knee.

The needle and thread were familiar things. Ordinary things. Your hands knew what to do with them, and doing something ordinary in an extraordinary situation was its own kind of anchor.

You worked quietly, pulling stitches through thick fabric, and kept a careful eye on the camp as it woke up around you.

It had taken you until mid-morning yesterday to properly register what you were wearing But now, in the quieter light of morning, you'd had occasion to notice.

The dress was practical. That was the first thing you'd noticed about it—obviously made with someone in mind who had things to do. Dark wool, simply cut, with deep pockets that you'd already discovered with quiet gratitude. The laces at the front were easy to manage. The shoes were sturdy and well-made, fitting in a way that made you suspect they'd been sourced with some care for your sizing, and they had good soles for uneven ground.

You hadn't asked where any of it had come from. Asking drew attention, and attention was something you were currently treating as a resource to be conserved.

The camp had settled into its mid-morning shape around you—some of the company still sleeping, a few already up and moving about with the efficient, habitual quiet of people accustomed to early starts. The fire had been built up against the chill and a pot set above it.

You were here. The company was here, nobody had hurt you. Today would probably be much like yesterday. That last part helped more than you would have been able to explain.

Dori appeared at your elbow while you were halfway through a patch on what you thought might be Bifur's jacket.

"You've neat hands," he said, observing your stitching with the critical eye of someone who had opinions about such things. He was immaculate himself—his grey hair braided precisely, his coat without visible dust despite the road. He looked at the pile of completed mending, then at you, and something in his expression shifted toward approval without quite arriving there. "Have you eaten lass?"

"I'll be ok," you said, without looking up.

A pause. "That was not what I asked."

"It didnt feel right," You kept your eyes on the stitch. "Helping myself."

Another pause, longer. Then the sound of him sitting down nearby, close enough that you were aware of him, far enough that he wasn't crowding you. Shortly afterward, a heel of bread appeared in your peripheral vision, set on the ground within easy reach, and Dori said nothing further about it and began attending to his own things.

You ate it quietly, between stitches, and didn't make a production of it.

Ori came to collect his boot-lace replacement shortly after, clutching his book to his chest in the way he always seemed to, and he looked at the neat repair with wide, sincere eyes. "Oh," he said. "Thank you. You really didn't have to—"

"It's fine," you said. "I didn't mind."

He hovered for a moment, clearly wanting to say something else, and then sat down beside you with the careful deliberateness of someone choosing their spot. He opened his book. You kept sewing. Between you, the fire crackled and the camp slowly woke around you, and it was the most comfortable you'd felt since you'd opened your eyes in that field.

You were aware of Kíli the way you were becoming aware of most things in the camp—peripherally first, and then with more attention when peripheral stopped being sufficient.

He'd been watching you, on and off, since breakfast. Not in an aggressive way, not even in a particularly pointed way—more the way someone watches a thing they're still in the middle of deciding how to categorise. He had a restless quality to him at the best of times, always moving, always fidgeting with something, and he'd been whittling a piece of wood down to nothing for the past half hour while his eyes kept drifting your way.

You concentrated on the shirt in your hands and waited for whatever it was.

"So," he said, eventually, dropping down cross-legged on the other side of the fire from you with the easy, boneless grace of someone who didn't have to think about how they moved. "You really haven't heard of Dwarves."

It wasn't quite a question. You kept your eyes on the needle. "No."

"Or Elves."

"No I haven't. "

A pause. "And you're not a Hobbit."

"No." You glanced up briefly. "I don't really think so, I don't have the—feet."

Kíli's mouth curved. He turned the piece of wood over in his hands. "Right, but—where does that you? Because you're—I mean, you're not a Dwarf, obviously." He gestured at you in a way that was more curious than rude. "And you're not an Elf. So what are you?"

The needle went in and out. In and out. You kept your breathing even.

"Just a person," you said.

"Yes, but what kind of person? Because there are—there's different kinds, that's the point, and you don't seem to be any of the—."

"Kíli."

"I'm just asking—"

Fíli's voice came from somewhere to your left, dry and patient in equal measure. You hadn't even heard him come over. He settled himself nearby with a cup of something hot and regarded his brother with the expression of someone who has had occasion to deploy this particular tone many times before and expects to deploy it many times again.

"She's busy," Fíli said. "Leave her alone."

"I'm not bothering her, I'm talking to her—"

"You're practically interrogating her."

"It's barely even interrogating—"

"Kíli."

Kíli made a sound of protest but subsided, turning his attention back to his piece of wood with exaggerated focus. You felt the tight place between your shoulders ease, fractionally.

You looked up and found Fíli watching you with a calm, level expression—not apologising on his brother's behalf exactly, more simply acknowledging the situation with the confidence of someone who considered that sufficient. You gave him a small nod. He returned it and looked away.

Kíli, for his part, lasted approximately five minutes before he was talking again—but this time to Fíli, something about the road ahead, and you were left to your sewing in peace.

You hadn't told them where you were from. Not because you couldn't remember—you remembered perfectly well, in vivid, unrelenting, unhelpful detail. But every time you'd thought about how to begin that particular explanation, you'd felt the shape of it and the shape was impossible.

You didn't have the words for it that would land in a way that made any sense in the context of this world, and making no sense felt worse than staying quiet. So you stayed quiet, and let them think whatever they were going to think, and got on with the shirt.

They were—not what you'd expected, was the thing. You hadn't known what to expect, precisely. The first hours had been too full of fear and shock for expectation to take a particular shape. But somewhere in the back of your mind there had been an assumption—a vague, unexamined thing—that a group this large, this armed, this visibly capable of significant violence, would have a quality of menace to them.

They didn't. Or—most of them didn't, most of the time, they were—loud. Not in the way that made you want to be somewhere else, but in the way of people who had been together long enough that their noise had a texture to it, a familiar shape of who talked over whom and who laughed at what and who was most likely to start something and who was most likely to finish it.

Bofur was always moving through the camp like a warm front, saying something to this one, clapping that one on the shoulder, producing his hat from places it had no business being. He'd given you a cheerful nod when the morning had properly started and asked if you'd slept alright, and when you'd nodded, he'd seemed genuinely satisfied with this information and moved on without making any more of it. You appreciated the not-making-more-of-it.

Balin had checked in on you mid-morning, asked how you were finding things, and listened to your answer with a quality of attention that made you feel your answer actually mattered. He had the patience of deep water and a way of framing things that made the world feel slightly more navigable.

Glóin had handed you a piece of dried fruit from somewhere about his person and said nothing whatsoever, which you'd decided to take as friendliness.

Dwalin had walked past you three times without looking at you and once looked directly at you for two full seconds before walking away, which had made your stomach do something unpleasant, but he hadn't said anything and nothing had happened, so you'd filed it under fine, probably fine and left it there.

Bombur had been cooking since early morning with the focused contentment of a craftsman, and when the midday meal appeared it was—genuinely good. Properly, surprisingly good, the kind of good that made you pause mid-bite and recalibrate. Something with vegetables and herbs that he'd sourced from who-only-knew where, thick and warm and exactly right for the temperature of the day.

"It's very good," you told him, quietly, when you found yourself near him. "The—the food. It's really good."

He beamed at you. Bombur's whole face participated in beaming in a way that was slightly overwhelming but entirely genuine, and he said something and patted the pot with great satisfaction, and you found yourself almost smiling back.

When the company stopped that evening they arranged themselves around the fire in the loose, habitual way of people who had been doing this long enough that positions had become unspoken tradition. You were still learning where you fit in the geography of it, which was a delicate navigation because fitting in wrong felt like an error you would be made aware of.

You ended up sitting between Dori and Ori, without quite intending to, the way things sometimes arranged themselves along the path of least resistance. Ori had arrived first, book open on his knee. Dori had appeared shortly afterward, surveyed the available space and arranged himself on your other side with the air of someone installing themselves in a position of oversight.

Ori was safe in the way that very earnest people are safe—too genuinely occupied with the world to be a threat to you. When Dori had sat on your other side, and for a moment you'd tensed, because Dori, despite your interactions was still broad and grey-haired and looked like he'd never let a thing get past him in his life—

He didn't crowd you. He just—made himself present. Refilled Ori's cup without being asked. Noticed when your bread had gone cold and exchanged it for a warmer piece from the pot without comment. When Ori dropped his pen and reached for it, Dori had already retrieved it, and when you went to shift the bowl you'd been handed, he was already there with a cloth to set it on.

You watched this happen around you, quietly, and understood that this was simply how Dori moved through the world—that the orbit of his care included Ori as its fixed centre and extended outward in concentric rings from there, and that you had, without negotiation, been included in one of those rings.

But he'd looked at Ori first, quick and assessing, the way you'd learned to spot—the almost-involuntary checking, the little adjustment of position that put him between Ori and the nearest edge of the group—then he'd looked at your bowl.

"You need more," he said.

"Oh, no, this is—"

"Bombur." It wasn't loud, just certain. Bombur, who was still at the cook pot, looked up. Dori held out your bowl. Bombur ladled more stew into it with great goodwill and absolutely no indication that this was unusual. Dori handed it back to you.

You looked at the fuller bowl.

"Thank you," you said.

Dori made a sound that was not don't mention it but meant roughly the same thing, and began on his own dinner, and that was that.

Ori leaned in slightly from your other side. "He does that," he said, quietly. "Don't be alarmed."

"Does he do it often?" you asked, just as quietly.

Ori's expression was long-suffering and deeply fond in equal measure. "Constantly."

It was a very strange feeling. Not bad. Just— strange.

You collected the dishes without thinking about it—it wasn't a decision, exactly. The meal finished, the light beginning its slow evening shift toward gold, and your hands were already moving, picking up bowls and cups and stacking them with the automatic efficiency of someone who had always been the person who dealt with these things. You had a stack of them before you'd consciously registered that you were doing it.

Several of the company glanced at you. You kept moving.

"You don't need to—" Ori began.

"There's a stream," you said, nodding in the direction you'd noted earlier. "I'll just—it won't take long."

by the time you'd registered that you were doing it you'd got six bowls stacked on your arm and the spoons in your other hand and it seemed more disruptive to stop than to continue.

Nobody commented. Oín handed his bowl up when he saw what you were doing, Bofur did the same, and Nori held his out sideways without looking, which you counted as a success.

"The stream," Bilbo said, appearing at your elbow. "Is about two minutes east." He paused. "I'll come, if you like."

"I'm fine," you said, and then thought about it. "Which direction is east?"

He pointed.

Dori opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked like he was weighing something and coming down on the side of not saying it. "Don't go further than the stream," he said instead, which wasn't what he'd been going to say but seemed to be what came out.

"I won't," you said, and went.

The stream was exactly where Bilbo said, and it was cold— genuinely, piercingly cold, and the stones under your careful footing were slick with damp. Maybe two minutes' walk from the camp, tucked in a fold of the ground where the trees grew closer together and the air had a different quality—cooler, damper, smelling of stone and moving water. In daylight it would have been pretty. In the early evening, with the light failing fast under the canopy, it was—less so.

You crouched at the bank and set to work.

The darkness came in at the edges of your vision the way it did in places where there was no artificial light to hold it at bay—not all at once, but in increments, the shadows thickening between the trees, the shapes of things becoming less distinct. The sound of the water covered other sounds. You were aware of this in a way that sat unpleasantly at the back of your neck.

It's fine, you told yourself, scrubbing efficiently at a bowl. It's a stream. You're two minutes from camp, you're fine.

Something moved in the trees across the water.

You went very still.

It moved again—a rustling, low and directionless, the kind of sound that could have been a small animal or a branch or nothing at all, your brain was not currently in the mood to extend the benefit of the doubt. Your hands had stopped moving, the bowl was suspended in the current.

A bird broke from the canopy overhead with a sharp, sudden cry that made you flinch hard enough to slosh water over your knees, then there was nothing—just the stream, and the trees, and the rapid sound of your own breathing.

You finished the dishes quickly and with less thoroughness than you'd started with, and you went back to the fire.

The fire had been built up in your absence and the camp had rearranged itself into its evening configuration—a loose, comfortable circle, pipes coming out, someone passing a waterskin around. The quality of the noise had changed from the purposeful sounds of a working camp to something more relaxed, voices lower and more constant, the occasional laugh.

You settled back into your spot and let the firelight do its work of making the treeline feel further away.

Bofur had his flute.

You'd heard him play before—brief snatches of things, absent-minded, the way some people hum. But this was different, this was deliberate, the melody he started was familiar to several of the others before it had gone four bars, if the way they sat up and the looks that passed between them were any indication.

Then he pulled the flute from his lips and started singing.

His voice was not refined. It was warm, rough and real, the kind of voice that had learned songs around fires rather than in any formal setting, and the song was the sort that wanted a lot of people— a call-and-response structure, a rolling chorus, a verse that clearly left space for someone else to pick up.

Kíli was first, dropping into a verse with easy confidence and a grin, adding something to whatever Bofur had established, and around the fire heads were nodding and feet were moving. Fíli came in on the chorus with him, and their voices together had a quality that made it obvious they'd done this many times—the blend of brothers who had sung together since they were small.

Bofur took the melody back. Pointed the flute at Dori.

Dori produced a verse of surprising warmth and considerably more musical training than his companions, hitting notes cleanly and with a control that made Ori watch him with undisguised admiration. Ori followed when the flute pointed his way, quieter and sweeter-voiced than you'd expected, eyes on his boots through the whole thing with the pleased embarrassment of someone who knew they could do the thing but didn't like being watched doing it.

Round the fire it went. Glóin, who was enthusiastic if not precisely accurate. Balin, who had a rich, easy baritone and a way of making his verse feel like a story rather than a performance. Even Gandalf contributed something, in a voice that seemed somehow to come from further away than it should have, the words he chose made several of the company laugh in a way that suggested they contained references you weren't going to follow.

And then Bofur's flute swung toward you.

The circle had gone expectant—turned, attentive, waiting. Bofur's eyebrows were raised, the expression on his face entirely good-natured and without pressure, but there it was, your turn.

Your mouth had gone dry.

"I—" you started, and then stopped, and could feel your face doing something you didn't have control of. All those eyes, not hostile, not unkind, just— watching. Waiting it was fine, you knew it was fine, but something in your chest had seized up in a way it did sometimes when attention collected around you, some deep, unhelpful instinct that filed everyone looking at you under 'danger' and began accordingly preparing.

"Come on," Nori said, from across the fire, and he wasn't unkind about it, just matter-of-fact, the way Nori seemed to be matter-of-fact about most things. "Even Bilbo managed one."

"I— yes, and it was terrible," Bilbo said, from along the log, with feeling. "I want that acknowledged."

"It was not terrible," Balin said, and his voice was gentle in a way that was somehow aimed at you as much as Bilbo. "It was perfectly fine. As anything would be."

But the kindness of it couldn't quite reach the thing that had locked up in your chest. The warmth of the fire, the expectant faces, the sound of your own pulse—you felt the attention like a physical thing pressing on your sternum, and your throat closed around nothing and you couldn't—You looked at the fire instead of the faces, and said—quietly, and meaning it—

"I don't—" you started, and your voice came out wrong, too thin. You cleared your throat. "I don't really— I'm not much of a singer, sorry."

One or two faces shifted toward polite disappointment.

"Don't apologise," Dori said, from your other side, short and certain. As if apologising were the part he objected to.

You pointed across the fire, quickly. "Nori was— you haven't had a go yet," you said, and looked at Nori with an expression that you hoped communicated please.

Nori, who had not been expecting to be drafted, looked between you and Bofur with a calculating pause. Then he shrugged, produced something unpredictable and slightly scandalous in three verses and the attention of the fire swung entirely away from you and toward the increasing hilarity of whatever he was implying about a merchant in a blue mountain, you sat back and let out a breath that you'd been holding for rather too long.

Bofur caught your eye across the fire, he didn't say anything. Just gave you a small nod and turned the flute back to his lips.

You folded your hands in your lap and watched the fire and let the singing go on around you, and it washed over you the way warmth does, slow and even.

Around you, the song grew louder, the voices of thirteen Dwarves rising into the night air with a fullness and a warmth that pushed against the dark at the edges of the camp, and above it all, the stars were doing what they did—impossibly numerous, impossibly clear, indifferent to everything below them in a way that was almost comforting in its vastness.

You thought about the flat. The sound of the television. The way the light under the door meant certain things.

The forest at the edge of which they'd stopped was not Mirkwood. The trees here were different trees—lighter, the canopy less heavy-handed, the air carrying the smell of proper autumn rather than the specific damp rot that had underlain everything in the forest of the Woodland Realm. The sounds were different, owls rather than the particular absence of sound that Mirkwood imposed, a distance-softened wind in the upper branches, the normalcy of a dark that was just dark rather than the dark of something watching.

No one commented on this. But the camp settled differently than it had before—the particular quality of people who have come through something and the specific tightness around the collective shoulders loosening by a fraction, one degree, the way a hand might loosen from a grip that had been held for too long.

Bilbo sat closest to the fire with his hands around his bowl and his eyes on the middle distance, doing the particular Bilbo thing of thinking something he wasn't ready to share. Kíli and Fíli were in low conversation at the near edge of the firelight, the murmured, continuous exchange of two people who had been in the same place for a long time and were commenting on the texture of it. Ori was writing something in his sketchbook with the focused, enclosed quality of a hobbit completely within his own task. Bombur stirred the pot with the patient, devoted attention he brought to all his cooking, and the smell of it moved through the camp in slow, beneficent waves.

Dwalin sharpened his axe's. Bofur's hat was visible over the near side of a log he'd claimed as a seat. Nori was doing something with a piece of rope that was probably practical and possibly not. Glóin, Óin, Bifur and Dori—all present, all accounted for, the familiar dwarven furniture of the camp arranged in its usual configurations.

Balin had the ledger on his knee writing in it with the small, precise motions that ledger work required, the charcoal moving in short, deliberate strokes, his other hand steadying the page against the slight movement of the night air. He wrote without looking at what he wrote with the ease of someone for whom this had become as automatic as breathing—the date, the position, the provisions, the condition of the company. The running record of the journey, maintained against the possibility that it would one day be the record rather than simply the account.

The space beside him, where a certain habitual arrangement of company had placed someone for many months, was empty. He wrote the entry for the day, at the end of it, he paused, the charcoal held above the page.

He wrote nothing further. Closed the ledger. Set it on his knee and looked at the fire.

Thorin was not directly in the camp—close enough to hear Bombur's spoon against the side of the pot, close enough to be back within reach in a matter of seconds if anything required it—but outside the firelight, in the dark between the camp and the treeline, sitting on a flat shelf of rock with his elbows on his knees and his gaze directed at nothing in particular.

The forest beyond the rock was quiet in the way forests were quiet when they were simply quiet and not doing anything else and Thorin sat in it with the quality he had in private—unmanaged, the careful administration of his expression relaxed, his face doing the things it did when there was no one to provide for.

He had been thinking about the Halls of the Woodland Realm, not about the Halls excatly—about what was in them, who was in them. The specific, low-grade persistence of a thought that had been finding him at intervals since the gates of Mirkwood had closed behind the company, the image that arrived with the quality of something that had been waiting and had found its moment, you, in that throne room, standing in the space the guards had made between you and Thorin with the expression you had when you were managing something. The gold bead in your hair, the quality of your eyes when he had said I will come back.

You had the calm certainty of someone who had decided to believe a thing and had committed to the belief completely and he had walked through the corridors and the gate had closed and the thought that was waiting for him every time he stopped moving with purpose was whether that certainty was something you still had, in whatever room that Elvenking had put you in.

That Elvenking, Thorin's jaw moved.

The word arrived the way it always arrived—with the specific weight of a name that carried years of complicated meaning, the layers of it accumulated over enough time that they'd become inseparable from the name itself. Elvenking. The elf who had turned his face from the suffering of Thorin's people, who had sat on his carved throne while Erebor fell and Thrór's line scattered to the margins of the world. Who had offered, and withheld, and offered again, whose offers had always had the quality of things that would cost more than they gave.

And now you were in his halls, Thorin looked at the dark between the trees. He thought about the quality of courtesy he'd observed—the composed, unhurried attention Thranduil brought to everything, the way he'd looked at you in the throne room, and then looked away, and the specific deliberateness of both movements. He thought about the bead Balin had placed in your hair and the way Thranduil had registered it without registering it, the small, precise flicker of his eyes to the gold and back before his expression settled into its default arrangement.

"She will be treated well because leverage must be maintained." He thought to himself.

He stopped this thought at its own edge and put it somewhere else. "but she is also not a woman people can look at and not—"

She was in stone halls with walls and a ceiling and people who, whatever their other qualities, took their courtesy seriously as a professional matter. She was clever in the particular, specific way of someone who had never admitted they were clever but demonstrated it continuously in the gap between what they said and what they understood, she would be fine.

He looked at the dark.

He did not find it particularly convincing, and sat with it anyway.

"I miss her," Ori said.

He said it to no one in particular, and to the fire, and to the general air of the camp at the particular hour when the food had been eaten and the doing was done and there was only the sitting left. His sketchbook was closed on his knee. His expression had the quality of someone who had been thinking something for a while and had arrived at the point where not saying it was more effort than saying it.

Kíli looked up. "Yeah," he said, and the agreement was immediate and unelaborated, which from Kíli was often more genuine than elaboration would have been.

"It's quieter," Fíli said. He was looking at the fire, his chin resting on one hand. "Not bad-quiet. Just—"

"Different-quiet," Kíli said.

"Yeah."

Ori looked at the empty patch of ground to Balin's left. "She always used to help with the ledger in the evening," he said. "Well—Balin would dictate and she would write, sometimes she would argue with the wording of things."

"She argued with the wording?" Bilbo said, from his place across the fire.

"With Balin," Ori confirmed. "About whether 'adequate' or 'sufficient' better described the quality of the provisions at one stop, I think, I don't remember which side she came down on."

"'Adequate' suggests you weren't satisfied," Bilbo said, apparently unable to stop himself having an opinion about this. "'Sufficient' is—"

"Neutral," Ori said.

"She chose 'sufficient,'" Balin said, without looking up from the ledger, which he had apparently reopened at some point in the last five minutes. "The Lass was right, I've been using it since."

A quiet that was not quite sad and not quite not-sad settled over the fire.

"She's probably driving them absolutely spare," Kíli said, with the cheerful certainty of someone accessing their best available resource for the current emotional climate, which was the same resource he accessed for most things. "Those Elvish lords. She'll have them completely—"

"She'll be managing," Bilbo said, which was the diplomatic version.

"She will be brilliant," Kíli said. "I'm saying those Elves have no idea what they're in for. Think about it." He sat forward, the animated quality that Kíli deployed for storytelling activating in his expression. "She's already put up with us long enough—"

"Kíli," Fíli said. "She didn't put up with us—"

"She didn't know who we all were," Bilbo said. "Not to start with."

"Doesn't matter. She's one of us—" Kíli looked around the fire. "—she is absolutely, one hundred percent, the most interesting person in those halls and every elf in there knows it."

Ori was smiling, which was the intended effect. Even Dwalin, from his position at the edge of the firelight, had produced a slight shift in his expression that on another face would have been a grin.

"I'll tell you what she's doing," Bofur said, settling into the specific posture of someone embarking on a tale they've already constructed in full. "Right now, as we speak."

"Oh no," Bilbo said.

"She's in the one of those vastly inadequate halls," Bofur said, with the authority of a born storyteller finding his rhythm. "All those Elvish lords, very elegant, very ancient, looking down their very long noses—"

"Bofur—"

"And she's asking too many questions," Bofur continued, undeterred. "About everything. How old is this column, what does that carving mean, why do you use that word and not this one—"

"She does ask questions," Ori said.

"She does every time. And those Elves are looking at each other thinking they've never had a guest who required quite this much effort to host, and Thranduil is at the end of the table—" Bofur put on an approximation of composed regality that was deeply unimpressive but functionally recognisable. "—doing this face—"

He produced a specific quality of extreme containment or constipation depending on each members position around the fire. "—because she's just asked him something he doesn't have a convenient answer to, and he's deciding whether to respond or to simply pretend she didn't say it, and she's waiting, because she always waits, she's got more patience than she looks like she has—"

"She has enormous patience," Balin said, quietly.

"—and by the end of this month," Bofur said, "every single Elvish lord in those halls knows exactly who she is and has at least one story about her that they genuinely don't know what to do with."

A silence, and then Ori made a sound that was very close to a laugh, and Kíli lost the battle he'd been fighting with his own expression, even Fíli bent his head for a moment.

"That is an extremely specific prediction," Bilbo said, though the corner of his mouth had done something.

"I know," Bofur said, with simple, complete confidence, and went back to his pipe. "But that's our Lass."

The fire popped. The pot simmered. The night moved on around them with the particular sound of a night that was just a night and nothing more demanding than that.

The camp went to sleep in stages, first Bombur, who always went first and always went comprehensively, the transition from awake to asleep so immediate it suggested the decision had been made some time before it was implemented. Then Ori, still with the sketchbook, Fíli retrieved it before it could fall and set it to the side with the care of a person who understood what the sketchbook meant. The others in their usual sequence—Nori, Glóin, Dori, Bifur, Bofur last among the main group, his hat set aside with the specific reverence he showed it and his expression in sleep considerably less animated than in waking but recognisably itself.

Kíli went last his face still carrying something of the expression from Bofur's story—not laughter itself but the residue of it, the slight lift that humor left in a face that had looked for a while like it needed it.

Bilbo was somewhere between sleep and not, curled on his side with the patient quality of a hobbit who had decided to wait for sleep rather than pursue it.

Dwalin was on watch at the camp's perimeter, which left the fire to two.

Balin saw it from the fire the way you saw things in firelight when you'd been looking at fire for a long time—not directly, but in the peripheral quality of awareness that fire produced, the way it changed the visibility of things at the edge of it. Thorin had come back from the dark some time ago and settled at the near edge of the firelight, not in the camp exactly but adjacent to it, his gaze in the fire.

The gaze had the quality of something that was looking at the fire and not seeing the fire.

Balin had known Thorin long enough to have catalogued most of the qualities of his various attentions. He knew the look of Thorin thinking about Erebor, which was a specific inward focus, a drawing-in, the particular gravity of a dwarf for whom a mountain existed as more than a geographical feature.

He knew the look of Thorin managing something—the controlled blankness of a leader who had decided not to bring a problem to the company until he'd assessed it. He knew the look of Thorin in a fight, and Thorin hearing bad news, and Thorin listening when he thought no one was observing him listen to. This look was one he'd been seeing for several weeks. Since the company had left, more or less.

Balin closed the ledger. Set it in his pack. Moved along the log he was seated on until the space between him and Thorin was conversational rather than polite, and sat.

Thorin looked up from the fire with the specific quality of someone surfacing from somewhere.

Balin said nothing. Put his hand on Thorin's shoulder, once, brief and solid, the gesture of long acquaintance that didn't require anything from either side.

"Me too, laddie,"

Thorin looked at him. The thing he'd been sitting with in the dark of the camp was briefly, very briefly, visible in his face—not articulated, not named, but present in the quality of his expression in the way that things were present in the expressions of people who were not accustomed to showing them and had not, entirely, meant to.

Then it settled back behind the composure, and Thorin looked at the fire.

"She'll be alright," Balin said.

"Yes," Thorin said. Which was agreement, and also something else underneath the agreement, and Balin let them both stand.

The fire settled. A log shifted, sending a small constellation of sparks upward into the dark, and they both watched it dissipate, and the quiet between them was the specific quiet of two people who had been in the same company for a long time and had stopped needing to fill silence to feel that it was being shared.

"When we take Erebor," Thorin said.

He said it the way he always said it—not if but when, the absolute certainty of the article a thing he had never permitted himself to let become a question, because some things could not be held at half-certainty. When we take Erebor was a load-bearing piece of his architecture, and he did not examine the structural integrity of it because examining it would require acknowledging the possibility that it bore less than it appeared to.

"When we take Erebor," Balin said, supplying the expected response, which was not a question either.

"The halls will need—" Thorin paused. Reformulated. "There is much to restore. Much that was likely destroyed, and more that simply—has had time, without maintenance—" He looked at the fire. "But the craftsmanship is in the rock. It doesn't decay. The bones of it. The deep roads and the high vaults. All of it waiting."

"Aye," Balin said.

"The forges will take longest," Thorin said, and his voice had a quality the specific register of the mountain—lower, more internal, the voice of someone speaking from a part of themselves they didn't usually let speak in public. "The upper forges first, for practical work. The deep ones—those will take longer, the equipment is—" He stopped. "But the craft is there. In all of us. We will rebuild it."

"We will," Balin said.

"And the treasury," Thorin said, and there was a quality now that was beginning to be slightly different from the quality of a dwarf talking about restoration—something in the tone that had changed temperature, a degree warmer, the way metal changed temperature when you held it long enough.

"It won't be as it was immediately. The gold was—scattered. But what Smaug did not shift remains, and what remains—" His jaw moved. "It will be enough to begin with. And there is still craft and work to be commissioned. The Dwarves of Erebor will not go wanting."

"No," Balin agreed.

"I will see to it," Thorin said, "that those who came with me want for nothing specifically." He looked at the fire, and the fire looked back at him the way fire looked at everything, without distinction. "The gold is not the focal point, it never was. The point is what can be done with it, what can be made, what can be given."

Thorin stopped, Balin looked at the side of his face.

"She has nothing," Thorin said. The quality of the voice had changed again—private now, in the way of a man speaking something he'd been thinking about in the dark between the camp and the treeline. "She came with nothing. Has been wearing the same clothes for months, the same—" He stopped. "She never asked for—never asked for a single thing."

"No," Balin said. "She hasn't."

"When we reach Erebor," Thorin said, "I will see that changes."

He said it with the flat certainty of a dwarf who had made a decision and was presenting it as a fact, which was the manner in which Thorin presented most decisions once they'd been made. But there was something in it that Balin was listening to with the more careful part of his attention, the part that had known Thorin through enough to know the difference between a decision that was about a person and a decision that was closer to the idea of a person.

"She will have quarters in the mountain," Thorin said. "Better than anything she's seen or been held in—rooms cut fresh from good stone, properly furnished, with light from the deep that comes up from below. She'll not be cold."

"Is that so," Balin said.

"And jewels," Thorin said, and his voice had gone quieter but not softer, the quietness of increasing focus rather than decreasing intensity. "There are pieces in the treasury—were pieces, will be again—that were made for—for the women of Durin. There is no reason—" He paused. "She deserves to be adorned properly. Gold in her hair and at her neck, at her wrists. Not the way she's been—not travelling clothes and borrowed things. The way she should be."

The fire was the only sound between them for a moment.

Balin sat with what he'd heard, and turned it over, and looked at the quality of it. He had been listening to Thorin for many years. Long enough to know what Thorin sounded like when he was talking about a goal and what he sounded like when he was talking about a plan, and what he sounded like when he was talking about something that had moved from one category into the other without his full awareness.

"She will need rooms that suit her," Balin said, carefully. "A need for warmth and comfort, safety. That is all true."

"Yes," Thorin said.

"She would want to be useful," Balin said. "She always wants to be useful. She was helping with the dishes inside a week of joining us. She was filling ledgers inside the first months."

"She won't need to do that," Thorin said. "Not in Erebor. There will be dwarves who—"

"She will want to," Balin said. Not sharply, just the way he said most things—plainly, without apology for the plainness. "It's not about necessity, it's who she is."

A pause.

"As for jewels," Balin said. "She's never—you've seen her, Thorin. She doesn't think in those terms. She would be pleased, I think, by something chosen with care. A token, carefully made. She is—" He thought of the fist bump. Of the way she'd slid extra stew across to Kíli and Fíli without drawing attention to it. Of the expression on her face when Bofur made her laugh. "She's not a woman who needs or wants gold the way we see it. She is a woman who values—being included."

Thorin looked at the fire. The quality of his expression was not one Balin could fully read from the angle he had, but the quality of the silence that followed was one he could read. It was the silence of someone who had heard something and was sitting with whether they agreed with it.

"I would give her everything," Thorin said, and the simplicity of it was absolute, the way simple things were absolute when they were true rather than performed. "Anything she asked of me."

"I know you would," Balin said.

"Is that wrong?"

Balin looked at the fire for a moment. "Wanting to give someone everything is not wrong," he said. "What matters is whether the everything you are wanting to give is the everything they would want to receive." He paused. "She is not a woman that needs things of value. She is her own value. She fills—" He thought of the empty patch to his left where she'd have been, the specific shape of the absence in the camp tonight. "She fills rooms differently from how you're imagining, shes not from Ered Luin."

Another silence.

"When we reach Erebor," Thorin said again, and this time the quality of it was slightly different—still certain, still absolute in the way that when was, but with a quality of something considered rather than simply stated.

"When we reach Erebor," Balin said, "she will want to know what you built. She will want to see the hall of the kings, not because they are golden, but because they are our history. She will want to know the names of things." He looked at the side of Thorin's face.

You pressed the heels of your hands to your eyes, The bead was warm against your neck, where it had been trapped between you and the soft down of the pillow.

"Okay." You annouced to the room as you sat up.

Neniel arrived without announcement, which was standard—the Halls operating on a principle of openness that probably made complete sense if you'd grown up in them and sat at a particular angle to privacy if you hadn't. She came around the carved archway that served as the room's entrance with the specific quality of movement she had in the mornings—efficient, directed professionalism usually carrying something or other.

Today the something was a considerable bundle of fabric, you eyed it with the immediate, instinctive wariness of someone who had been presented with fabric by Neniel on many mornings, understood that fabric generally meant clothing in this context and had considerable experience refusing said clothing.

This bundle was large, clearly more than one thing. It was in various shades of green that you could make out even in the compressed shape of the bundle, and the specific quality of the fabric—the way the light moved on it even folded and carried — communicated the same craftsmanship that everything in the Halls communicated, careful, intentional and not remotely aligned with your policy of wearing Radagast's dress every single day.

Neniel looked at your face, you looked at the bundle, you opened your mouth.

Neniel held up her free hand, with the patient but absolute quality of someone preempting an objection they had prepared for. She crossed the room, sat on the end of the bed—which she rarely did, the specific informality of the sitting communicating that this was a different kind of conversation from the usual—set the bundle down between you.

You looked at it, then at her. She began to unfold the top garment.

It was green—not the green of the festival dress, not the particular Elvish formal green that had started to feel like a category you were being enrolled in, but a specific, quieter green that was closer to the colour of the moss in the garden alcove, the colour of something that had been growing in a specific, patient place for a long time. Simply cut, practical in its way, with the long sleeves that characterised most of what was worn by elves. She laid it across the bed and reached for the next one—another green, slightly different, slightly warmer, the green of the forest in early morning rather than its midday density.

There were five of them, you looked at the pile, and at Neniel, with the expression of someone who had prepared several arguments and was currently reassessing whether it applied.

"I took some of the dresses from the stone wardrobe," Neniel said, with the specific, slightly careful tone of someone disclosing something. "Since they had not been worn." She looked at the pile. "My sister and I have been working on them. Over the last few weeks."

You opened your mouth again.

"Just, Look," she said, and reached for the sleeve of the nearest dress, and turned it inside out.

The inside of the sleeve was embroidered.

Not decoratively—not in the way the outside of Elvish garments were embroidered, the minimal, considered exterior craft that announced quality without making a statement of it. This was different. Dense, fine, the stitching small and precise in the way of someone who had spent time on each individual element rather than completing a pattern. The characters were not ones you recognised, but the arrangement of them—groups of specific size and shape, separated by small spaces—produced a clear impression.

"It is in Sindarin," she said. "I do not know the script of the dwarves—I thought this might suffice, to have it something of them." She turned the sleeve slightly, so the stitching caught the morning light. "The names of Oakenshield's company."

You looked at the inside of the sleeve.

Something arrived in your chest that was not a feeling you had a ready category for—not grief, not happiness, not the specific sweet ache of missing, but something that partook of all three and was more than the sum of them. You reached out and touched the embroidery, very lightly, with the tips of your fingers. The thread was raised slightly from the fabric beneath it, the specific physical reality of something that had been made by hand over time with intention.

Balin's name was in there, somewhere. You didn't know which character was which, couldn't read it, but it was in there. Thorin was there too, in all his stubbornness. All of them were in there.

"How—" you started, and found the question needed a moment. "How did you get the names?"

Neniel looked at you. And then, with the specific quality of a person whose expression had moved—very slightly, very briefly—from professional to something that was not professional at all, and who was aware of this and not going to pretend otherwise. "I may have copied them," she said. "From the ledger."

"The—"

"In the cells," she said, and the quality of her expression now was a thing you'd never seen from her before, which was mischievous.

"Neniel," you said.

"The ledger was left on the bench," she said. "The guards had left it It, and their names were in it, and it was very convenient to just—"

"You copied from a prison ledger," you said, and your voice came out with the specific, strangled quality of someone trying to process several things at once while also processing the fact that Neniel—composed, professional, entirely correct Neniel—was sitting on the end of your bed with a guilty expression and five dresses she'd embroidered with stolen names.

"Shh," Neniel said, which was the first time in the entirety of your acquaintance she had made that sound, and the absurdity of it landed somewhere in your chest alongside everything else and the landing produced a sound that you hadn't made in weeks.

You laughed.

Not the polite, managed sound of someone laughing at something they found mildly amusing, not the suppressed sound of laughter that was being kept appropriate for the context, but a real one, the kind that came up from somewhere before you'd decided to let it, and Neniel's expression went from mildly guilty to something that was its own kind of laugh, and you sat together on the end of the bed with five embroidered dresses between you and the morning light coming in at its usual pace, and dissolved.

You wore the moss-green one, you told yourself it was the practical choice—warmer than Radagast's dress, better fitted for the particular cold that the Halls maintained regardless of the season. You could feel the embroidery when you pushed the sleeve back, the raised thread against the inside of your arms, the feeling of it was the specific, warm reality of something that had been made for you by someone who had understood what it needed to mean.

The day settled into its usual configuration. Breakfast brought by Neniel, taken in the garden alcove because the morning light in the garden alcove was the best version of morning available in the Halls of the woodland realm. The moss underfoot, already familiar, the shape of your own sitting gradually impressed into it over weeks of the same position.

You ran through Khuzdul in your head—vocabulary, the words you'd accumulated over months of lessons and corrections and Thorin's specific, unhurried patience with your pronunciation and found that they were still there, sitting in the correct place, waiting, you were not going to lose what you'd learned.

You moved through the morning with the usual combination of purpose and aimlessness that characterised your days—the garden alcove for an hour, then a circuit of the corridors, then the healing halls to check if anyone needed assistance, though most had been well enough to move to their own quarters in the last several days.

Legolas had been in and out over the week since the attack, spending time with the recovering patrol members and coordinating with the guard about what the attack meant and what it meant for the patrols going forward. He acknowledged you when your paths crossed in the healing halls with the direct, easy courtesy that had developed between you since the festival—not the formal manner of the court, not the particular register of someone navigating a social situation, just the comfortable acknowledgement of two people who had spent a long day working in the same room and had come out of it knowing something about each other.

It was on your third circuit of the corridors—having turned down a passage you hadn't taken before, one of the branches of the Halls that you hadn't fully mapped—that you found something remarkable.

The passage opened into something that wasn't a room and wasn't a corridor and had no category in the architecture of spaces you'd accumulated. It was — broad, and high, with the particular quality of the Halls' carved stone softened here by something that had grown into it over time, the same patient accommodation of nature that the architecture of the whole place was built around. Moss on the floor, considerably more of it than the garden alcove, deep and unbroken, the specific rich green of moss that had been growing in exactly this place for longer than you could calculate. The stone walls curved rather than meeting at angles, the shape of the space organic in a way that the rest of the Halls wasn't quite, and the ceiling was high enough that the upper portions of it were in shadow.

And in the shadow, outlined by the ambient light of the stone, standing in the moss with the composed and absolute self-possession of something that had been here before you arrived and was entirely confident in the hierarchy of the situation

A stag he was—enormous. That arrived first, before the detail, the sheer scale of him, the specific spatial fact of how much of the room he occupied relative to everything else in it. The antlers were extraordinary, branching with the complex, architectural deliberateness of something that had been growing for a very long time and had not been in any hurry to finish, the colour of him was the deep, particular brown of old bark, rich and varied in the low light. He was looking at you with the calm, absolute attention of an animal that had assessed a new element in its space and reached a verdict.

Several smaller elk were further back in the curved space, their presence soft and partial in the shadows, heads up, also looking.

You stayed where you were in the archway, you did this not because you'd made a strategic decision to stay still but because the quality of the stag's attention made you stay still, the specific, gravitational presence of a very large animal that was not frightened of you and was not threatening you and was also not inviting you to do anything other than stay exactly where you were while it continued to form its opinion.

His nostrils moved, you breathed very carefully as if breath alone would dissolve this magnificent creature. His head turned, slightly, the enormous antlers tracking with the movement, and then returned to its previous position. He dropped his gaze and lowered his head to the moss, with the unhurried, entirely certain motion of something that had concluded you were not interesting enough to warrant continued attention, and began eating.

You let out a breath, the smaller elk had relaxed when he had—two of them had their heads down in the moss now, and the third was still watching you but with a quality of alertness that was curiosity rather than alarm. You stayed in the archway and watched them, the particular quiet of the space settled around you, the ambient hum of the stone and the sound of the elk moving through the moss and the very distant sound of the falls somewhere below.

There was no reason to move, so you didn't.

The deeper passages of the Woodland Realm held a quieter light at this hour, the carved stone filtering the ambient glow into something cooler and more restrained. Thranduil moved through them without sound, the soft fall of his steps absorbed by long familiarity with every curve and threshold. He had not intended to come this way. The council had concluded, the necessary words spoken. Yet his path had brought him here, to the high archway that opened upon one of the deeper levels where the elk sometimes gathered when the mood took them.

He halted at the far edge of the arch, still within the shadow of the passage. She was there.

The Daughter of Man, the one who had arrived in the company of Thorin Oakenshield and the Dwarves—an improbable, transient creature whose continued presence within these halls was a matter of temporary convenience and nothing more. A bargaining piece, in the end. Something to be returned when the white gems of Lasgalen were at last restored to their rightful place. He had told himself this repeatedly since the morning she had first presumed to set foot in the healing halls. He told himself so again now, with the precise internal cadence of a Elvenking who did not permit idle sentiment to take root.

She stood near the great stag, close enough that the animal’s breath stirred the edge of her sleeve. The dress she wore was one of the simpler garments, it did not suit the stone around her, nor the quiet dignity she held herself with, when she was not being defiant. Yet she seemed unaware of the mismatch. One hand rested lightly against the carved pillar of the archway, the cold of the stone no doubt seeping through the thin fabric, though she gave no sign of discomfort. The other hung loose at her side. She was simply… present. Watching the elk with an unguarded attention that struck him as both foolish and strangely complete.

The stag continued its unhurried grazing among the moss that grew in soft green cushions along the floor. The younger elk remained in their loose configuration nearby, ears flicking occasionally, entirely untroubled by the mortal in their midst.

Thranduil observed this without moving, It was not unusual for the animals to tolerate the presence of Elves. That they should extend the same calm acceptance to a woman of Man was an aberration he chose, for the moment, not to examine too closely.

He remained where he was, half-concealed by the curve of the stone. There was no need to announce himself. There was no need for her to know he stood witness. She was, after all, of no lasting consequence. A temporary occupant of space that would, in due course, be emptied of her. He permitted himself the observation of her posture, the slight weariness still lingering in the set of her shoulders, the way the ambient light caught the edge of her profile. All of it catalogued with the detached precision he applied to any unexpected element within his realm. Nothing more.

She shifted her weight slightly, settling more fully against the archway. The movement was small, unconscious. A Daughter of Man at rest, nothing remarkable. He had seen countless such creatures across the long years—brief, bright, and soon gone. This one would be no different. The arrangement would be honoured, she would be returned, the gems would follow, the matter would close.

And yet he did not leave, the soft tear of moss beneath the stag’s teeth, the distant, constant hum of the living stone, the faint stir of air through the higher carvings. Into that silence came a sound so slight he almost dismissed it as imagination.

It was not song. It was not any melody he recognised from the ancient repertoires of his people, nor the coarser airs sometimes carried by travelling Men. It was thinner than either—barely audible, involuntary, the sort of sound a creature might make when the mind has wandered far from deliberate thought and the body, left to itself, gives voice to something deeper and wordless. A faint, continuous thread of tone, almost lost against the ambient quiet of the halls.

Thranduil’s gaze sharpened, he did not move, he did not speak. The sound continued, soft and unselfconscious, rising and falling with no discernible pattern he could name. It was not directed at the elk, nor at the stone, nor at any audience. It simply was—an unguarded expression of presence that should have been insignificant.

Yet he could not place it.

Something in the quality of it brushed against the edges of recognition and then slipped away, leaving only the unsettled awareness that he had heard a thing for which he possessed no ready category. His brow drew the smallest fraction inward—the briefest contraction of something between thought and instinct—before long practice smoothed the expression back into its customary stillness. He looked at the stag. He looked at the woman who remained entirely unaware of his regard. He looked at the space of quiet air that separated them.

A Daughter of Man, a temporary inconvenience whose usefulness would end the moment Erebor’s gates opened and the old debts were settled.

He repeated the assessment once more, carefully, as though the repetition itself could restore the proper distance.

Then, without sound, he turned and withdrew the way he had come. The passage received him. The deeper quiet of the corridors closed around his departure. Behind him the elk continued grazing, the moss unmoved, the faint and unplaceable sound lingering only as if by memory.

The dining hall that evening was performing its usual careful choreography of social obligation. Light from the high, carved apertures fell in soft, layered bands across the long tables, catching on crystal and silver and the pale edges of elven sleeves. Conversation moved in measured currents—never too loud, never too swift—while servers passed with the silent precision of people who had refined their craft over centuries.

You occupied your usual place within it, seated, composed, offering responses calibrated to the weight of each question, and reserving the greater part of your attention for the food, which remained extraordinary no matter how complicated everything else about these dinners became.

The talk had, thus far, concerned the administrative arrangements required for after the festival. These, you had learned, were extensive—schedules of residual hospitality, the reallocation of certain stores, the quiet accounting of favours still owed. From there the conversation had drifted into a lengthy exchange about the condition of the roads. The language was careful, almost delicate, it carried the particular quality of people discussing a military situation while pretending the subject was merely logistical.

An elf to your right then offered a detailed observation about a new development in the maintained garden of the lower east wing, speaking of it with the seriousness usually reserved for matters of state. You had nodded where appropriate, answered when directly addressed, and otherwise allowed the currents to move around you.

You had worked your way through two courses and were making a considered assessment of the third when the server arrived at your left shoulder.

“More wine, híril?”

The question landed normally at first—another polite inquiry in a sequence of them—and then landed again, differently. Your mind caught on a single unfamiliar word and held it up for examination. The server had already moved on with the smooth efficiency of someone who had attended many such dinners, refilling the cup of the next guest without pause. You looked down at your own cup. It held water; you had established that preference early and it had been respected without comment ever since. The liquid was unchanged. Only the word that had accompanied it remained, suspended in the air after the speaker had gone.

Híril.

You had never heard it before, It had not been used in the healing halls, nor in the quieter passages, nor by any of the household who had addressed you in the days since your arrival. No one had paused to explain. Yet the server had spoken it with the unremarked naturalness of a word that already belonged—settled, default, the ordinary form of address applied to you in this hall as though it had always been so.

You turned the sound over carefully. The shape of it. The way it sat in the mouth.

Your gaze travelled the considerable length of the table.

Thranduil occupied his place at the far end with the composed, distributed attention he brought to every formal gathering, present in every part of the room without appearing to fix upon any single one. The ambient light caught the edges of the silver at his collar and the pale fall of his hair. For a moment he seemed entirely absorbed in the conversation nearest him.

Then his eyes found yours, the contact was brief, deliberate, and entirely without surprise. He had been aware of the exchange, of that you were suddenly certain. One eyebrow rose in a slow, precise arc. At the corner of his mouth a very slight curve appeared—not quite a smile, not quite the absence of one. It was the expression of someone who recognised exactly what had just been said, who understood the weight and the implication of the word, and who had no intention whatsoever of offering an explanation across the occupied length of the table.

The look held for a single measured heartbeat, then he returned his attention to the elf speaking at his right, the faint smirk still lingering as though the private knowledge of it amused him.

You remained still, the water in your cup untouched, around you the choreography of the hall continued without interruption, the soft clink of utensils, the measured rise and fall of Sindarin and the Common Tongue, the unhurried passage of servers. No one else appeared to have noticed the word, or if they had, they treated it as entirely ordinary.

You looked once more toward the head of the table. Thranduil did not glance back. The raised brow and the almost-smirk had already done their work, the question had been acknowledged and deliberately left unanswered. Whatever the word meant, he knew. And for reasons that remained entirely his own, he had chosen to let you sit with the sound of it, undefined, for the remainder of the evening.

You lowered your eyes to your plate. The food was still extraordinary. The conversation continued its careful circuits. And the unfamiliar title rested in the quiet space behind your thoughts, waiting for a definition that no one in the room seemed inclined to provide.

The horn came at the end of the third course, not the horn you'd heard before—the one that had arrived with the quality of an emergency, the sound that had cut through the stone with an urgency your body had registered before your mind could name it.

That earlier blast had sent healers moving, had meant blackened wounds and the controlled chaos of the halls filling with the injured. This was different, you heard it and your hand went at once to the table’s edge, the trained response of someone who had learned, in a short and brutal span of days, what horn blasts preceded in this place.

Your pulse answered before your thoughts did. The muscles along your shoulders tightened. For a fraction of a second the dining hall around you seemed to overlay itself with the memory of the healing halls, the sharp scent of athelas, the low voices of the healers. You had only ever heard the horn under those circumstances. Your body, efficient and uninterested in nuance, prepared itself for the same.

Several of the Elves nearest the doorway began to rise, chairs shifting back with soft, precise sounds against the stone. Others half-turned, attention sharpening toward the far end of the hall. The response was immediate, collective—yet it lacked the controlled urgency of an attack. There was something else beneath it, a quality you could not immediately name. Not alarm, or not only alarm. Something closer to readiness tempered by recognition, the posture of people who had heard this particular call before and understood its meaning without needing it explained.

Thranduil stood, his motion was fluid, unhurried, the kind of rising that did not disturb the air around it. As the first of the standing guests made to follow, he lifted one hand in a small, elegant gesture—palm slightly angled, fingers relaxed, the barest inclination of the wrist. It was not a command spoken aloud, it did not need to be. The Elves who had begun to rise settled back into their seats at once, the movement ripple-quiet, obedience so complete it appeared almost voluntary. Conversation, which had faltered, did not fully resume, it simply waited.

He did not look toward you. He did not look toward anyone in particular, his gaze was already fixed on the inner corridors at the far end of the dining hall—the passage that connected to the entrance of the Halls. With the same composed economy of motion he turned and swept from the room, the long lines of his robes moving with him in a single unbroken flow. The corridors received him without sound.

Around you the dining hall adjusted itself. The Elves who had stood now sat fully once more. Plates were returned to, cups were lifted. The conversation that restarted carried the specific, slightly altered quality of people who had established that this was not an emergency and were content to continue with the evening while the relevant portions of the Halls’ administration dealt with whatever had arrived.

Someone to your left made a quiet remark about the seasoning of the third course. Someone further down answered with a reference a vineyard. The ordinary machinery of the meal resumed, polished and unbroken, yet the distinction still arrived only slowly in the back of your mind, half-formed and insufficient.

What was that horn for ?

Not a warning. Not the call that preceded the wounded. Was it the sound of something—someone—arriving who had been expected. The outer doors, distantly and then less distantly, opened with the measured quality of a door being drawn for guests rather than thrown wide in haste. Footsteps followed, multiple sets, purposeful, moving through the entrance halls with the confidence of those who knew precisely where they were going.

You looked at the passage. At the corridors through which Thranduil had disappeared. At the passage again.

The bus rumbled through streets that grew progressively darker, progressively quieter, progressively more desperate. Neon signs gave way to broken streetlights. Shop windows with elaborate displays became barred doors and security gates. This was the part of the city that the postcards forgot to mention.

Your stop came too soon and not soon enough. The apartment building loomed above you, all crumbling brick and rusted fire escapes, a monument to deferred maintenance and broken promises. You climbed the stairs slowly, each step an act of will, each floor bringing you closer to a door you didn't want to open.

The hallway on the fourth floor smelled like old cooking oil and defeat. Your apartment was 3C, right next to 3B where the lights were always off and strange sounds sometimes echoed through the walls at odd hours. You'd learned not to ask questions in buildings like this.

Curiosity was a luxury you couldn't afford.

Your key turned in the lock with a click that sounded too loud, too final. The door stuck the way it always did, and you had to put your shoulder into it, which meant you came into the apartment a little off-balance, keys still in your hand, bag still on your shoulder—no time to arrange yourself into whatever version of you might have helped.

Early on, when the paint still smelled and the two of you still laughed about the broken radiator, he’d be there with a cheap bottle and that crooked smile that made the rest of the city feel temporary. You’d told yourself the drinking was just stress. The jealousy just heat. The nights he shook against you after another failed interview just proof he needed you. You still remembered the shape of those apologies more clearly than the shape of his hands. The hallway light flickered the same way it had the first time.

The apartment hit you like a physical force—the reek of cigarettes and cheap whiskey, the staleness of air that hadn't circulated in days, the particular quality of tension that came from sharing space with someone who'd been drinking and thinking in equal calculation.

You always knew—there was a quality to the air in the flat when he'd been sitting alone with his thoughts, a pressure that had nothing to do with sound or temperature and everything to do with what was building inside it.

You used to love the way he thought. Late conversations that stretched until the streetlights went out, plans that never quite landed, the way he’d say your name like it might break. Somewhere between the first raise and the third time the rent came only from your account, those conversations had turned into something else. You still caught yourself listening for the old voice underneath. That was the part that hurt in a different register—the hoping.

He was sitting in the armchair, the one piece of furniture in the whole place that wasn't falling apart, because he'd claimed it first and defended it like territory. The television was off. It was always on when things were fine, a constant background noise he couldn't stand to be without.

The ashtray on the arm was overflowing, a pyramid of butts and ash that threatened to spill onto the floor. An empty bottle stood on the table beside him like a soldier at attention. You felt it, the way you'd feel a change in weather. The silence landed in your chest like something dropped.

Your keys were still in your hand. You hadn't moved past the doorway. Coat, you thought. Just hang up the coat. Steady.

"You're late." His voice was flat, emotionless, which was somehow worse than if he'd been yelling. "Work ended an hour and a half ago."

You tried to joke first, that sometimes still worked when the bottle was only half gone.

“I know—traffic was a disaster and I’m pretty sure the bus driver had a personal vendetta.” You kept your voice light, the rhythm of making yourself smaller so he could feel larger. “You look like you’ve had a rough day should I put the kettle on?”

He didn’t smile. The flatness stayed. You felt the first real drop then—not fear yet, just the quiet reminder that the man who used to laugh at your jokes didn’t live here anymore.

Your body did the thing it always did—a cold, sliding drop in your stomach, a tightening across your shoulders, your lungs reducing themselves to smaller, quieter operations. You made yourself move. Coat on the hook. Hands down. Just be normal.

He was already standing, already moving toward you with that particular gait that made your heart rate spike, you took one step back before you could stop yourself, the small automatic retreat of a body that had learned things your mind still tried to argue against.

"The bus," he repeated, his laugh sharp and humorless. "Right. The bus. You think I'm stupid? Huh bitch ?"

He was already inventing. You’d learned the shape of it years ago, though knowing never stopped it. The nights he came home smelling of someone else’s perfume he’d spend the next three days accusing you of lives that existed only in his head.

"I'm not—there's—j-just working" The words tangled on your tongue, because how did you convince someone that the narrative they'd invented in their head wasn't real?

"Yea, sure working." He stood up, the open bottle clutched in his fist, already half-empty. "That what you're calling it now?"

"It's not—I was at work, you can call and ask—"

"Oh, I'm sure you were at the work. Question is, what you were doing there. Or who you were doing." He moved closer, and you instinctively took a step back, your shoulders hitting the door you'd just closed. "You think I'm stupid? You think I don't know?"

Your bag slipped from your shoulder to the floor. "I don't know what you're talking about. I was at work, I swear." you said, and hated that your voice had climbed slightly, hated that he could hear it too, that any change in register became evidence. "I was at work and then I was on the bus and then I was here. That's it. There's nothing else."

"Bullshit." He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. "Dressed up in those little work outfits, you think I don't know what kind of girl you really are?"

You believed him. That was the worst of it, the things he’d said about you settled into your bones like truth. That you were the kind of women men only wanted for a night. That the raise, the late buses, the careful way you dressed for work were all just proof.

He stayed out of pity, because no one else would have you, because you were lucky he’d ever looked twice, the quieter voice underneath—the one in your head that sounded suspiciously like him even when he wasn’t near you to speak—whispered that maybe he was right. The thoughts sat heavy and familiar. You didn’t fight it anymore.

"It's not—Ive never—"

"DON'T YOU FUCKIN' LIE TO ME!"

The bottle shattered against the wall beside your head and you flinched, throwing your arms up instinctively. Whiskey and glass rained down, and then his hands were on your shoulders, shoving you hard against the door.

For half a second you looked for him—hoping the old softness would surface. It didn’t. What stared back was only the rage and the self-pity and the particular stillness of a man who had decided the only way to feel powerful was to make someone else feel small. The person you’d fallen in love with wasn’t in the room anymore. You realized it too late, the way you always did—right as the violence arrived.

"Who is he? Tell me his name!"

"There's no one! I swear, there's no—"

"LIAR!"

You let the sound of him break over you in waves and you went somewhere behind your eyes where it was very quiet, where you were thinking about nothing in particular, where you were just waiting for it to be over.

"—think you're so clever, do you, think I don't—"

The shove came suddenly, violently, sending you stumbling sideways into the tiny kitchen area. Your hip caught the corner of the counter and pain exploded white-hot through your side. You tried to catch yourself, but your work shoes—those stupid, impractical, heeled work shoes—found no purchase on the grimy linoleum.

You knew the shape of it by heart, every move of it, the escalation mapped and memorised the way you memorise something you wish you didn't have to know. You knew staying calm made it worse, you knew showing emotion made it worse, you knew that moving toward the door— even toward the bathroom, even toward anywhere—made it worse.

You’d stayed because leaving felt like admitting you’d chosen wrong. Because every time he wept and swore it would never happen again some exhausted part of you believed him. And because some quieter, more stubborn part still thought that if you just got it right—said the right thing, arrived at the right time, made yourself small enough or soft enough or careful enough—he might come back.

You went down hard, hands barely breaking your fall, the impact jarring through your wrists and elbows. One shoe buckle snapped with a sound like breaking bone.

"You think I'm stupid?" He was closer now, and closer meant you could smell it on him, the sour edge under his words that loomed over you, dark and predatory the stillness of a serpent before its strike. "You think I don't notice? Coming home late, is that how you got that raise—"

"Please—I'm not lying," you said, and your voice shook but it didn't stop. "I've never lied to you. Not once. No matter what you think I swea—"

You didn't get to finish the sentence.

It had never helped that he said he loved you once. That felt like information about a different person in a different life, something you'd read about and half-remembered.

You wondered, in the small white space between one blow and the next, whether he’d ever meant it. Or whether love had simply been the word he used until the real one—possession—came easier. The question felt almost academic now.

You registered his fists connection before you registered pain—some old animal part of your brain flinching a half-second ahead of the rest of you—you registered his heavy boot in your peripheral—and then there was a flash of white and a ringing silence, it happened faster then you expected it to, you thought distantly.

The last thing you were aware of was the ceiling, tilted at a strange angle, The last impact was a white, obliterating thing.

'Oh. So this is how it happens.'

Then there was nothing at all.

The first thing was the smell, not cigarettes, damp and the particular staleness of your flat. Something else entirely—something green and living and faintly sweet, the smell of sun on grass and clean air moving through it. You registered it before you were fully conscious, your brain turning toward it the way a plant turns toward light, helpless and instinctive.

The second thing was warmth. Not the mean, grudging warmth of your flat's ancient radiator, but open, generous warmth, the kind that came from above and soaked into things rather than merely heating them. It lay across your face and your hands like something placed there deliberately.

The third thing was that nothing hurt. Or—things hurt, in a distant, muffled way that suggested your body was aware of its recent history but wasn't currently shouting about it. Your head ached. But underneath that there was a remarkable physical sensation of—rest. Of having been put down somewhere and left in slumber.

You didn't open your eyes immediately. There didn't seem to be any urgency. Wherever you were was warm and smelled of living things and nothing in it was yelling at you, and that was—that was a great deal, actually. You lay very still and breathed and let yourself exist without demanding that existence explain itself.

He did it, you thought, with a kind of dreamy detachment. Maybe he actually went that far this time.

You turned this over, considered it. The curious thing was how little distress came with the consideration. If this was it—this warmth, this smell, this quiet—then dead was not so bad. You'd left behind the flat and the flickering light and the sound of his voice and the bus, and in exchange you had gotten warm grass and sunlight, and that felt, in whatever remained of your rational brain, like a reasonable almost undeserved trade.

The grass moved under your hand. You could feel individual blades of it, cool and real between your fingers.

You opened your eyes.

Blue. An almost impossible blue, a blue so clear and uncomplicated it looked like someone had decided to do sky correctly this time. A few clouds, enormous and white and in no particular hurry, moving slowly enough that you could watch them go. And at the very edge of your vision—

Rolling hills, gentle and impossibly lush, the kind of green that didn't belong in the city or anywhere near it. The kind of green you'd seen in photographs of places you'd never been and assumed were somewhat if not entirely edited.

You sat up slowly, almost cautiously. The field stretched in every direction, gently undulating, crisscrossed by a low stone wall and dotted here and there with trees that were just beginning to turn. In the middle distance you could make out the shapes of what might be a road, and beside it, what appeared to be—

People—Quite a lot of people.

Moving toward you with a purposeful, if somewhat disorganised, energy.

You scrambled back before you'd actively made the decision to do it, your hands found the grass and pushed, your heels skidding against the earth, and you got yourself upright somehow and took several lurching steps backward because the voices were overlapping and the figures were large and there were—there were so many of them—

"She's awake—"

"Give her room—"

"I told you she was breathing—"

"Back up, all of you, give her space—"

You pressed the back of your hand to your mouth and tried to get your breathing under control, which was not going particularly well, because you had just woken up in a field and there were approximately a dozen—people? persons— converging on the spot where you'd been lying, and your heart was doing something extremely unhelpful in your chest.

You made yourself look. Made yourself take them in properly, because panic was not going to help you and looking was better than not looking.

They were—some of them were large and some of them where very large, as tall as doors and just as wide. Broad and dark and armoured in a way that was not decorative, leather, chainmail and weapons at their hips that were clearly not decorative either. One of them was enormous across the shoulders, completely bald with tattoos running across his scalp, he had axes on his back—axes, plural—you looked at him and then very firmly looked at something else.

The one at the front was tall and dark-haired, with a face that had the quality of stone—strong-jawed, sharp-eyed, bearing an authority so natural it seemed to be simply part of his physical composition rather than anything he performed. He wore a dark coat trimmed with fur over layered armour, a sword at his hip, and he was looking at you with an expression that was neither hostile nor particularly welcoming. Assessing, the look of a man deciding what something was before deciding what to do with it.

Beside him stood a shorter figure, wrapped in a coat and a cheerful hat with earflaps that seemed entirely at odds with everything else in the vicinity. He had a warm, open face under it all, bright eyes and a wide mouth that was already quirking at the corners with something that wanted to be a smile.

Near the back—you almost missed him at first, because he was standing very still and slightly apart from the others. A shorter round figure in a yellow weskit and a look of profound personal alarm on his face, which was oddly comforting because at least someone else found this whole thing alarming.

"You are safe." The dark-haired, one raised a hand— steady, unhurried. His voice was deep and carried without effort. "None here mean you harm."

You stared at him. Your mouth was doing something, but it wasn't yet producing words.

"She's frightened," said the cheerful one in the hat, and his voice had a warm lilt to it. "Course she is. Stand back, lads, you're looming something terrible."

There was a general, shuffling backwards. The enormous tattooed one remained exactly where he was, but several of the others stepped back, which reduced the immediate sensation of being encircled by a wall of men.

You pulled in a breath. Let it out slowly. You were still shaking, you could feel it in your hands, and you pressed them against your sides to keep it less visible.

"W-who are you?" you managed. Your voice came out very small.

The dark-haired one was Thorin. He said it plainly, without softening, and his eyes did not leave your face while he said it. Thorin Oakenshield, as the giant old man with the staff and the extraordinary hat would supply a moment later, the name landed with a weight that clearly meant something to everyone present except you.

The old man was Gandalf. He introduced himself with the slight air of someone accustomed to the name doing more work than it currently was, and bent down before he regarded you with eyes that were doing several things simultaneously under their bushy grey brows.

Then, mercifully, the cheerful one in the hat stepped forward—he tipped his hat with an easy, natural grace.

"Bofur," he said. "At your service. Don't worry yourself about this lot—they look worse than they are." He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. "Well. Most of them."

One or two of the others made sounds of mild offence. Bofur looked delighted.

The names came after that, attached to faces you were struggling to organise. Balin, white-haired and kind-eyed and the one who came closest to making you feel that someone here was pleased to have you conscious. Dwalin beside him—the bald, tattooed one you'd very deliberately not looked at, who had a broad, battle-scarred face and the default expression of a man who did not waste energy on small talk. You caught his eye accidentally and looked away immediately.

Fíli and Kíli were pointed out to you together, as if that was simply how they came—brothers, apparently sisters-sons to Thorin, standing close enough that their shoulders almost touched. Fíli was fair-haired and broad as the rest of them, with an impressive braided mustache, twin blades at his back and a watchful steadiness to him. Kíli was darker—nearly black-haired, with a bow across his back and brown eyes that were tracking you with an open curiosity that was somehow at least a little less threatening then the rest of the men in vicinity. When you accidentally met his gaze he didn't look away. He just tilted his head slightly, like he was still working something out, you looked elsewhere.

Óin and Glóin were brothers, you were told. Glóin had an extraordinarily impressive red beard and a direct, appraising manner. Óin carried a brass ear-trumpet and cupped it toward you when Bofur made your introduction, which you weren't sure how to respond to. Dori was neat and grey-haired with impressive looping braids connecting his beard to his hair, he looked mildly disapproving of everything as a general policy. Nori had an extraordinary starfish of hair and darting eyes that made you feel he was noting things about you for later purposes you probably wouldn't like. Ori, youngest-looking of them, had a earnest face under a knitted scarf and was clutching a book to his chest. Bifur had an axe-head embedded in his forehead—you saw it, looked away, looked back, you couldn't help it—he communicated in gestures and a language you didn't know. Bombur was round and currently eating something from a cloth bundle.

The small, round one in the yellow weskit stepped forward and stopped. He looked at you. You looked at him. He was almost exactly your height, his eyes level with yours in a way that none of the others had been, and something about that made your chest loosen fractionally, some animal part of your brain deciding that things your own size were slightly less alarming.

He peered at you with an expression of polite but genuine puzzlement.

"I'm sorry," he said, in a pleasant, slightly flustered voice, "but—are you a underhill? You have something of the look, around the—no, perhaps a Took. There's a branch of the Tooks on the Bywater Road who are on the eaatern side, or perhaps a Smallborrow, my mother always said the Smallborrows ran—no, wait—" He stopped himself, tilting his head. "Which family are you from?"

You stared at him. "I—sorry?"

"Your family name," he said, a little more carefully, as if perhaps you hadn't understood the question. "I don't believe we've been introduced. I know most of the families in the Shire but I can't quite place you."

"I don't—" you started. "I'm not—I don't know what a Shire is, I—"

He blinked. And then his gaze dropped. Slowly, with the focused attention of someone checking something they should have checked earlier, he looked at your feet.

Your feet. In their sensible, entirely ordinary looking shoes. Then he looked at your ears. Round and flat and unremarkable against the sides of your head.

Something shifted in his expression—confusion resolving into a kind of startled realisation. He looked back at your face with wide eyes.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, you're not—you're not a hobbit at all, are you?"

"I don't know what a hobbit is,"

He opened and closed his mouth once. Then he collected himself with visible effort and extended his hand with a slightly dazed formality. "Bilbo Baggins," he said. "Of the Shire. And I'm— well, a hobbit— I'm also rather new to all of this, if that helps at all."

It did, a little.

"I don't know where I am," you admitted, and your voice came out slightly wobbly. "I was at home, and then I wasn't, and I don't understand any of this."

"Yes," said Bilbo, with great and genuine feeling. "Yes. I know exactly what you mean."

Thorin moved apart from the group to speak with Gandalf, and even at a distance and in low voices, the conversation had a quality of tension in it that the others were studiously pretending not to notice.

You sat in the grass with your knees pulled up and tried to be as small and unobtrusive as possible, which was not a sensation that required any particular effort. Bilbo had settled nearby, which you were grateful for, and Bofur crouched a little way off, humming something quietly to himself and not looking at you in a way that felt deliberately, kindly undemanding.

You couldn't make out all of the words but fragments carried.

"—knows nothing of the road—"

"—cannot account for—"

"—She'll be another mouth, another liability—"

You pulled your knees tighter. You knew the shape of being discussed, you'd had enough experience of it, you looked very hard at a point on the ground and kept your face neutral.

Bilbo had heard it too. You could tell by the way his jaw had set, the way he straightened almost imperceptibly.

"Right," he said, quietly but with a firmness you hadn't expected from him. He stood up, smoothed his weskit, and walked toward Thorin and Gandalf with the slightly braced air of someone who was making himself do something rather than doing it naturally.

You watched, bewildered, as this Bilbo inserted himself into what was clearly a private conversation between people who were considerably more imposing than him and began speaking with a quiet, earnest conviction that—

You couldn't hear all of it. Something about circumstances. Something about we found her, not the other way round. Something about what would you have us do, leave her in a field?

Bofur materialised beside you. "Don't take it to heart," he said, low and easy. "Thorin—he's got a lot on his mind. It's not personal."

"It sounds a little personal," you said, and then wished you hadn't.

Bofur's mouth curved. "Aye, well. It sounds a lot of ways. But Bilbo's got a good point, and Thorin knows it, he just needs a minute to get there." He looked across at the ongoing conversation, where Bilbo was still going, steady and determined, with Gandalf watching from the side with an expression of quiet approval. "Besides," Bofur added, "you can't very well stay here."

You looked at the empty field around you. The rolling green hills. The road, which disappeared in both directions into more of the same.

"Suppose not," you admitted.

"And we could use the extra hands, someone who's good at keeping quiet and not making trouble," Bofur said, and then glanced at you sideways. "You are good at keeping quiet, aren't you?"

Your brain actually stalled out for a second, the earlier noise of 'Don't you dare stand there and lie to my face—' echoed across the inside of your skull, you nodded silently.

"Brilliant. Then you're already more useful than Nori."

You looked toward Nori. He was, at that exact moment, attempting to convince Bifur to hand over something that Bifur was clearly not convinced he should hand over.

You didn't say anything, neither did Bofur. But something in your chest had shifted, ever so slightly, toward something less like panic.

Across the grass, Thorin was listening now, his arms crossed and his expression closed but no longer actively arguing. Bilbo said something else—too quiet to carry—Thorin looked past him at you, one long, flat look, before his gaze moved back to Bilbo and he said something short and final and turned away.

Bilbo walked back toward you. His expression was one of composed relief, the face of someone who'd got the thing they wanted and was not going to make a show of it.

"You're welcome to come with us," he said, simply. "If you want to."

You stared at him. "Did you just—argue on my behalf?"

"Someone had to," he said, with mild indignation, and sat back down.

You looked at Bofur. He shrugged, grinning. "He grows on you."

The decision was less a decision and more the absence of any other option. You stood in the grass and you looked at the road that went in two directions and meant nothing, you looked at the group of people—the company, you were already hearing them call themselves—that was preparing to move with the organised efficiency of people who had done this before. Packs were checked, straps tightened, and the ponies were brought forward, each one already familiar with its rider, shifting and snorting in the afternoon light.

Thorin did not look at you again. He swung up onto his mount with the focused, forward-looking set of a man with a destination and the will to reach it, and his company began to settle into their saddles around him, and that was simply how it was.

The nearest pony looked enormous when someone—Dori, you thought—held the reins out toward you without comment. Your hands were not entirely steady as you took them. The height of the stirrup, the breadth of the animal’s back, the simple fact of being expected to climb up and trust it, all of it pressed against the raw place that still flinched at the proximity of strangers. You kept your face carefully neutral and mounted with more determination than grace, the pony shifting under your weight in a way that made your pulse jump before it settled again.

Bilbo appeared at your shoulder, already seated on a pony that seemed better proportioned to someone of your shared height. He had a small pack of his own, a little overstuffed, and he adjusted the strap with a slight grimace. “I’d suggest staying toward the middle,” he said quietly. “It’s—generally safer, bit less exposed.”

“Have you done this before?” you asked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “But it seems like the sort of thing that’s true.”

You almost smiled. It surprised you when you felt it happen.

Bofur’s pony fell into place on your other side as the company started forward, his hands loose on the reins, hat bobbing slightly with the animal’s gait. He started humming again, something quiet and rhythmic that matched the pace well, and he didn’t try to start a conversation or fill the silence with anything, he just rode and somehow that was exactly right.

You followed the road into the open afternoon, the pony’s steady movement beneath you both foreign and strangely grounding.

Behind you, you were aware—peripherally, without looking—of the others guiding their own mounts into place somewhere nearby. The nearness of so many of them at once still sat wrong under your skin, a low, constant alertness that had nowhere to go.

You didn’t look back. You kept your eyes on the road and your hands careful on the reins and you breathed in the impossible clean air and tried to let the warmth of the sun mean something.

You stopped walking, the Halls' usual everyday movement had changed. The particular unhurried quality of elves moving through spaces they knew well had shifted into something faster, more directed, the composure still present but operating at a higher register, the kind of composure that was being maintained under pressure rather than simply inhabited. Two guards rounded the corner at the far end of the corridor you were in and moved past you without acknowledgement, their pace the fast controlled pace of people going somewhere specific with urgency.

You started walking faster, following the direction of the guards without a plan beyond 'something is happening' and the particular instinct that had developed over months of travel that said following people who knew what they were doing was generally more useful than standing idle.

The grand entrance—the great carved doors you'd come through the day the company arrived, which stood closed and sealed save for the festival itself—was at the end of a descending walkway, you heard it before you saw it, the sound of the doors being thrown wide, both of them, the groan of enormous stone pivots moving faster than their usual ceremonial pace, and then the particular change in the air quality that came from a large enclosed space suddenly connected to the outside.

You rounded the corner and stopped. The first thing that resolved out of the movement and the noise—was stretchers, carried by elves who were moving at speed, four to each stretcher, the particular focused efficiency of people who had done this before and were doing it now with everything that implied about the severity of the situation. They came through the open doors in a continuous stream, one after another, each one carrying a figure that was—you moved to the side of the corridor to let them pass and your eyes went to the nearest stretcher and stayed.

Blood.

Not the black blood of Wargs, not the blood from the goblin caves—this was different, and the same, the specific dark viscosity of it, but this was on elves. On the long, composed limbs of elves, on faces that were tight with something, on torsos from which arrows had been removed—you could see the wounds, you could see the puckered darkness of wounds that were not closing the way wounds closed, the black spreading outward from each injury in the specific pattern you recognised, without quite being able to name, as something worse than the wound itself.

Your hand went to the wall. You counted, one stretcher, two, five, ten. They kept coming in a continuous stream. The corridor was full of them, the healers who had arrived from somewhere deeper in the Halls meeting the stretcher-bearers and redirecting them, voices in Sindarin overlapping—not frantic, because elves did not do frantic, but with the compressed, urgent quality of a people managing a crisis through training rather than through calm.

You shook yourself, you had been standing at the edge of it for long enough. You fell in beside the nearest stretcher, keeping pace, and followed the stream of the wounded deeper into the Halls.

The healing halls were a space you hadn't been to. They occupied a lower wing, further from your rooms, they had a quality different from the rest of the Halls—the stone here was lighter, if that was possible, some quality of the pale rock that admitted what light there was more completely, and the carved openings in the walls were larger, more of them, the air moving through freely. Tables of smooth stone lined the walls, and cabinets, and the organised complexity of a medical space that had been in use for a very long time by very competent elves—supplies, instruments and preparations arranged with the same meticulous attention that governed everything in the Woodland Realm.

Legolas arrived with the sea of wounded, walking tall and giving orders, he had blood on his left sleeve and a cut above one ear that had closed but was not cleaned, he was coordinating the incoming wounded with the directed efficiency of someone who had moved immediately from the patrol into this and was running on the adrenaline and training that had taken over from whatever else he'd been feeling. His Sindarin was sharper than his conversational register—clipped, precise, each instruction landing and being acted on without repetition, his eyes moving across the room in the continuous assessment of someone managing multiple simultaneous priorities with a system his body knew better than his conscious mind did.

You watched him direct two healers to the most critical stretcher. Watched the healers' faces as they looked at the wounds—the specific, controlled alarm of medical professionals registering something serious. Watched the way the black had spread along the veins of the elf's arm from the wound site, dark against pale skin, moving with the particular deliberate quality of something that was not finished.

The word arrived with the cold clarity of something your brain had been circling and now landed on. The arrows had been poisoned. The wounds weren't closing because the poison was keeping them open and bleeding sluggishly, doing something to the tissue, or—you didn't know enough to know specifically what, but the shape of it was clear, and the shape of it was urgent in the specific way of things that got worse if they were not addressed quickly.

You looked around the room. At the wounded coming in, at the healers stretched across them, at the supplies on the wall tables and the water jugs, the clean cloth piled on a shelf and the basins that needed carrying, the surfaces that needed restocking with tinctures and herbs, the hundred small supporting tasks that the healers couldn't do while they were doing their work.

You crossed to the first shelf. Found what appeared to be a clean sheet, folded, white. You shook it out, assessed it, and tied it around your waist as an improvised apron with the practical efficiency of someone who had decided that the question of whether this was their business had already been answered.

You picked up an empty water jug. Looked for a source. Found it. Filled it.

You started working.

He came around the corner like weather, you were carrying a basin from one side of the healing hall to the other, moving between two healers who were bent over adjacent patients, and you registered him in the same way you'd learned to register Thranduil's arrivals—the change in the room's quality, the particular recalibration of the space around him, before the visual confirmation. You looked up.

The armour was not something you'd seen before, It was—complete, in a way that the robes and the court dress were not complete, the completion of something made for a purpose it was currently serving. Silver plates articulated at every joint, the craftsmanship of it so integrated with the movement of the body beneath it that it looked less like something he was wearing and more like something he had become. Thranduil was fastening the pauldron at his left shoulder as he came through the door, his fingers working the fastening with the automatic efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times, and the expression on his face was—Unguarded.

For three seconds, perhaps four, the composure that was as much a part of his appearance as the crown or the robes simply was not there. His eyes went across the room in a sweep that took in the stretchers, the healers, the wounded—his people two full patrols, poisoned arrows and black blood spreading from wounds—what was in his face in those seconds was not anger and not fear but something that preceded both of them, the specific, raw quality of a person confronting something they would not have permitted if they had been in position to prevent it.

Then his gaze landed on you, different quality—the expression shifting, reorganising itself, the composure coming back up as a specific mechanism, something being managed. His jaw tightened.

You didn't notice the change, you were moving from one side of the room to the other again with the basin, then going back for the next thing you had taken the assessment of the room and turned it into a circuit—water, cloths, basin, restock the pile of Athelas, repeat. You were on your third repetition of it with the focused efficiency of someone who had identified a contribution they could make and was making it.

Thranduil crossed the room and arrived in your path in the specific way he arrived in things—completely, so that not being aware of him was not an option.

“You should not be here,” he said.

You stepped around him to reach the cloth shelf. “Someone has to do this.”

“Someone is doing this. The healers—”

“The healers are occupied with the people who are dying,” you said, with the flat, practical calm of someone in the middle of a task. You picked up a stack of cloth and turned. “I am not doing anything a healer needs to do. I am doing the things that need to be done so the healers can do their work.”

His hand came to your arm—not grabbing, not hard, but stopping. The specific quality of a hand placed with intent. “You are a guest of this realm,” he said, his voice low and precise, “A daughter of Man. You are to be returned to the company of Thorin Oakenshield unharmed. That is an expectation I intend to honour.”

Something in your chest that had been running on focused, task-directed energy tripped and converted into something else. You turned and looked at him with the specific expression of someone who has just heard something come out of a person’s mouth and is deciding what to do with it.

“That’s what your thinking about?” you said. “Your gems?”

Thranduil looked at you. The silence that followed was not empty.

“You want to give me back in one piece so you get your white gems once Erebor is reclaimed,” you said, and the words were not loud but carried a quality that made the air between you feel thinner. “Because your leverage needs to be unharmed so it still has value when the mountain is—.”

“I did not say that,” he answered, in the tone of someone correcting a misrepresentation with measured force.

“You said daughter of Man,” you returned. “because I am a category rather than a person standing in front of you with blood on her hands.” You stopped. Breathed once. Looked at the cloth in your hands, then at the room, at the wounded, at the healers bent over bodies where black was still spreading up arms from poisoned wounds. “Every hand that can move, carry or fetch is a hand that frees someone who knows what they are doing. It's a simple arithmetic, and you know it.”

He held your gaze in return. His jaw was set with the specific quality of a elf managing several things simultaneously and possessing limited patience for having that management challenged—while underneath it, confronted with the sight of two full patrols of his own people fighting poison with healers stretched too thin to cover them all.

“If I go back to the company” you said, quieter now, more direct, “when I go back—I can not tell them I watched people in need and did nothing. I am not capable of that, if you mean to send me back to them, send me back as someone they would recognise.”

“You will not remain here,” he said, the words flat, final, delivered without heat and without room for negotiation. “You will leave this hall. Now.”

“No.”

The single syllable landed between you like a blade set down on stone.

Something moved through Thranduil’s expression—quick, almost involuntary—before the composure closed over it again. He looked at you as though seeing the shape of you for the first time and finding it inconveniently solid.

“You mistake my forbearance for invitation,” he said, voice still low, still precise, but colder now. “I am not requesting. You will not touch another basin. You will not approach another wounded elf. You will return to the chambers assigned to you and remain there until I decide otherwise.”

You did not step back. You held the stack of cloth against your chest and met his eyes without flinching.

“And you mistake me for a dutiful bargaining chip"

His gaze did not waver. For a moment the air between you felt thinner, charged with something that had not been there when he first spoke. The Elvenking who had spoken of arrangements and categories was still present—but something beneath it had begun to take notice of the person standing in front of him, and the noticing itself seemed to irritate him.

“You will leave,” he repeated, the words stripped of any softness. “That is not a suggestion. It is a command. Disobey it and you will find the hospitality of this realm has limits even for those I intend to return unharmed.”

He released your arm. The absence of his hand felt deliberate, a withdrawal rather than a release.

You did not answer. You only looked at him, the stack of cloth still in your hands, the circuit of water and cloths and Athelas still waiting in the edges of your vision.

He waited, expecting compliance. When it did not come immediately, something settled into the set of his mouth.

“Go,” he said. “Now.”

You met his gaze one last time, the argument unfinished but the command clear. Then you set the cloth down on the nearest surface with deliberate care, turned, and walked toward the far side of the hall—away from the outer doors, away from him.

Thranduil watched you for a breath longer, a guard appeared at his left and spoke five words in Sindarin, Thranduil nodded, then turned and left the healing halls without looking back.

The moment the sound of his steps faded, you picked the cloth up again, filled the basin, and returned to the circuit you had made—water, cloths, basin, Athelas—because the arithmetic had not changed, and neither had you.

The work had a rhythm to it, this was what you found, over the first hour—the specific rhythm of a medical space under pressure, which was different from the rhythms you'd accumulated over months of travel but sat in the same category of useful pattern. You didn't know what the healers needed before they asked for it, not at first. You learned quickly. Water, always water, clean cloth in quantity, and the specific basins that carried the used materials away from the workspaces, and the resupply of whatever herb was running low on the tables, and occasionally a hand to hold—not yours, because you were not a healer and were not pretending to be, but the hand of a wounded elf while a healer worked, and the holding of it was a different kind of task than the carrying and restocking but was a task nonetheless.

The black blood was everywhere, not you imagined, in the way of a battlefield—you'd never seen a battle, the Wargs in the clearing was no battlefield, the organised intensity of a healing space was its own category entirely—present, unavoidable, the specific viscous dark of it on the white cloths and in the basins and occasionally on you. You tied your sleeves back further and kept moving.

Legolas found you somewhere in the middle of the third hour.

He appeared at your elbow between tasks, you registered the blood on him was still there, which meant he hadn't stopped either, and the cut above his ear had been cleaned at some point by someone.

"You're still here," he said. Not accusatory just observational.

"Yes," you said, picking up a basin of used dressings.

He fell into step beside you, heading the same direction, carrying something from across the room that needed to go where you were going. You walked in silence for a few steps, the shared silence of people in the middle of work.

"Ada rode out," Legolas said.

"I know," you said.

"He'll ride as far as the damage went," Legolas said, with the quality of someone who knew exactly how far that was and what it meant. "He'll want to see it. Two full patrols." He paused. "There's over thirty of his people here."

You looked at the nearest stretcher. At the elf on it, whose healer had gotten ahead of the black spreading from the wound site, the specific quality of the tissue improving, the dark receding by small, measurable degrees. "Will they—"

"The ones brought in early." He looked at the room with the assessment that had been running continuously since you'd arrived. "Some of the later ones—" He stopped.

You moved to the next task, and he moved to the next of his, and the healing halls worked around you both.

Later—in one of the brief, relative pauses between the acute crisis and the ongoing monitoring, when the most critical patients had been stabilised and the rhythm had shifted from emergency to sustained attention—Legolas came and sat on the stone bench at the edge of the hall where you'd stopped for a moment to catch your breath.

He sat with his forearms on his knees, looking at the room, and didn't say anything immediately, and you sat beside him and didn't say anything either.

"The wars," he said, eventually. "In Doriath." He said the names the way he said most things in this register—without performance, without the particular weight of someone delivering historical significance, just as the names of things that had been. "My father was young, by our count, he saw things that—" He paused. "He doesn't show it, but the weight of it is present in everything he does."

You looked at the wounded elf nearest you—stable now, sleeping, the black reduced to a fading line where the wound was beginning, slowly, to close.

"He came in here and tried to move me on," you said. "Like I was inventory." You looked at your hands. At the black blood dried on your knuckles.

Legolas was quiet for a moment. "He has his methods," he said, carefully.

"I know," you said. "I do know that." You turned the water cup in your hands. "I was harsh. At the festival, before—I said—I shouldn't have. About your family. I didn't know you were—"

"No," Legolas said. "you didn't."

"I still shouldn't have said it." You looked at the floor. "I know he has—I know it's not simple. The way he is. I know there must be more to it than—" You stopped, because you didn't have the full picture, only the edges of it, the shape that the edges implied. "I shouldn't have said it regardless."

Legolas looked at the room for a moment. At the healers, at the wounded, at the specific quality of the space that was doing what it was built to do. "He is not easy" he said. "He has never been easy—" He stopped, and the stop had a particular quality, the specific pause of someone navigating the edge of something they were not sure they were going to go further with. "He became—less. After my mother." A pause. "He withdrew. Into the responsibilities. He retreated into it, and the retreat became—" Another pause. "The retreat became where he lives."

You looked at Legolas, he looked at the middle distance, and his expression was the expression of someone who had lived alongside something for a very long time and had found a way to carry it that was functional without being resolved.

"I'm so sorry," you said.

He looked at you. The directness of his gaze was steady. "He is still my father" he said, before shifting his gaze back to the room. "Sometimes I worry the work is all that holds him."

You sat with this, and the healing hall worked quietly around you, and somewhere outside the Halls Thranduil was riding through the forest to see what poisoned arrows meant about the state of the southern dark, and Legolas sat beside you on the stone bench with his bloodied sleeve and the closed cut above his ear, and you thought about the weight people carried that they didn't show, and about the specific, different weights of specific, different peoples, didn't say any of it because saying it aloud wasn't needed.

One of the healers found you restocking the cloth shelf in the middle of the afternoon, working steadily through the task with the focused efficiency you'd maintained all day, and came to stand beside you with the specific, evaluating attention of someone who had been watching you work and had arrived at a conclusion.

"The Elvenking will not be pleased," she said, carefully with the tone of someone presenting information rather than making a threat.

"The Elvenking's pleasure is not my concern," you said, without stopping.

"He was very specific in his instructions regarding—"

"I know," you said again. "He can be as angry as he likes." You set the last of the cleaned cloths on the shelf and turned to look at her—with the quality of someone who had made a decision they were not going to unmake.

"I'll deal with his displeasure when the work is done. Can you tell me if the patient in the third bed needs there dressing changed?"

The healer looked at you for a moment. "Yes," she said. "He does." She turned back to her patients, and you picked up the dressings, and the afternoon continued.

Thranduil came back when the light through the carved openings had gone the amber of late afternoon.

You were not in the middle of a task when he arrived. You were standing at the edge of the hall, having reached the natural pause between the day’s sustained crisis and the evening’s ongoing monitoring, your hands were still for the first time in hours. Without deciding to—with the absent, exhausted automaticity of someone running on the very end of their resources—you had used the corner of your improvised apron to wipe your face.

The cloth came away with black blood, sweat and the general residue of a very long day spent in the healing halls. You were looking at it, vaguely, when you heard him come in.

He stopped inside the doorway.

He had blood on him—the blood of something that had been met in the forest and addressed. The armour was still on, he carried the particular quality of someone who had ridden to the edge of what his people had suffered and ridden back with it, the weight of command still settled across his shoulders like a second set of plates.

His eyes went around the room. The assessment— the same one as this morning, covering the same ground, but arriving at different numbers. The critical cases stable. The black receding from wounds. The healers moving at a different pace, the emergency rhythm replaced with the sustained attention of people managing a situation rather than actively fighting it.

His people, stabilised, his eyes came to you.

You looked back at him, apron still in one hand, the black smear across your face only partially shifted by the cloth, and waited. The look you gave him was not defiant in any loud sense. It was the look of someone who had worked all day, who knew exactly what she had done, and who was not going to rearrange her posture or her face to make her disobedience easier for him to digest.

He saw the exhaustion on you—the way your shoulders had dropped the fraction they only dropped when the last of the adrenaline had burned off a person, the slight tremor in your fingers, the hollowed quality under your eyes that no amount of composure could fully mask. He saw it and he refused, with deliberate precision, to let the recognition reach his expression. To acknowledge it would have been to acknowledge that she had stayed. That she had disobeyed. That the quieter hall and the stabilised wounded were, in some measurable part, the result of her hands he had ordered away from the basins and the cloths.

Something moved through his face—anger, sharp and tightly held, standing right at the edge of what he would allow to surface. It was the anger of a king whose command had been set aside, whose arrangement had been treated as optional, who now stood looking at the proof that the option had worked. The anger wanted language. It wanted the correction spoken aloud, the reminder of the chambers she was supposed to have returned to, the precise and cutting words that would restore the order he had laid down that morning.

He did not give it, you saw the blood on him in return—that had dried in places along the edge of a vambrace and near the join of the pauldron. You saw the same exhausted set to his mouth that he was refusing to see on yours. You saw the way his eyes had gone over the hall and then settled on you with a weight that was not only authority.

In the silence that stretched between the doorway and the place where you stood, you almost dared him—not with words, not even with expression but with the simple, unmoving fact of your presence—to correct you. To name the disobedience, to force the confrontation he was so carefully holding at the edge of his control.

He looked at the apron. At the black blood that the cloth had moved but not removed from your face. At your hands, still carrying the residue of the day’s work. At the room behind you, quieter than it had been, the quality of it different from what it had been this morning.

The anger remained, tightly leashed. The recognition of your exhaustion remained, deliberately unacknowledged. The mutual, unspoken knowledge of how long both of you had been on your feet sat between you like a presence neither would name.

Something moved through his face that his face immediately composed over. A single motion, brief and total—the closing of a door that had almost, almost opened.

He lifted his chin, turned on his heel and walked out, the sound of his steps measured, absolute, and utterly without the satisfaction of having spoken a single word.

His chambers lay at the end of a corridor the ambient light reached differently—some quality of the stone or the angle that made the glow of it feel cooler and deeper here, more like the bottom of water than the surface of it.

The walls rose in the living curves of the Woodland Realm, carved and shaped rather than built, the pale stone carrying its own soft luminescence from high in the vaulted ceiling. The air held the particular stillness of places that existed far from the forest’s surface, insulated from wind and bird-call and the changing of the light. It was a space designed for the Elvenking who had long ago decided that the outside world would come to him only when he permitted it.

He stood near the low table setting aside his armour, the pauldron already unfastened and laid down, the heavier plates of the breast and back removed with the mechanical precision of long habit. The vambrace on his left arm resisted. The catch had caught on something—dried blood, perhaps, or the slight warping of metal that came from a day spent riding and fighting—it would not release cleanly. He worked at it with his right hand, fingers pressing and turning with increasing force, the small mechanical refusal becoming, without warning, intolerable.

Two full patrols of his people, he had come back to the healing halls and found them quieter, she had been standing there with the residue of the day still on her—black dried on her hands, a stolen sheet of all things tied around her waist like an apron, her face marked with the same exhaustion he refused to name. She had looked at him without apology or performance, with the flat directness of someone who had made a decision and had no particular interest in being congratulated or punished for it. He had told himself as he rode out that morning that the anger was the appropriate response. In the forest, among the trees and the things that moved through them, he had been unable to maintain that anger without examining it. The examination had not been comfortable.

‘I can not tell them I watched people in need and did nothing.’

The vambrace still would not come free. He twisted harder. The edge of the metal bit into the skin of his wrist. The physical irritation was useful. It occupied the surface of his attention while the deeper current tried, once again, to rise.

The shape at the bottom of everything was not something he thought about directly. He had learned, over centuries, that thinking about it directly was less productive than working beside it—doing the things that needed to be done, the endless, necessary work of being the Elvenking, the patrols, the councils and the long management of a realm that existed at the edge of something that wanted to consume it. The work held him upright. He had told Legolas this once, foolishly, in the specific indirect way he communicated most things of weight, and he suspected his son had understood it more completely than he had intended.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

She had left a hole in everything, not the same kind that the battles left, not the same kind that the long years of isolation left. A different kind—the kind that had a particular shape, the shape of a specific person rather than a general absence. Thousands of years, and the outline of her remained exact.

The manner of her death had been so violent, so absolute, that she did not wait for him, not even for their son. Elves lingered in the Halls of Mandos, held by the memory of those who still lived, by the promise of eventual reunion. She did not, he knew that he had never found the heart to tell his son that whatever had been done to her in that fortress of rot had severed the possibility of return with a finality that left no echo. No waiting, only a void, precise and permanent, around which he had built the rest of his unending existence.

The thought rose higher than it should have. For a moment he almost let it fully arrive—almost allowed the image, the last of her, the particular quality of the violence that had taken her—the despair that lived beneath the composure surged upward like black water seeking a crack in stone.

Thranduil forced it down, the motion was visceral, deliberate, almost physical. He turned the catch of the vambrace with a sharp, final twist that tore the metal free. The plate clattered onto the table. He stood with his breath held, jaw locked, the full weight of centuries of practice pressing the memory back into the place where it belonged, acknowledged as his architecture, never entered as habitation. He would not be consumed, he had refused that fate for longer than most kingdoms had existed, and he would continue to refuse it.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

She—the guest, the defiant, brash, entirely improbable woman who had ended up in his halls, who had believed his two-thousand-year-old wine had gone foul, who had walked into his healing halls and worked all day because the idea of not working when people needed help was simply not something she was capable of—was not her. Was not anything like her, in manner or in origin or in the particular quality of her presence, there could be no comparison between mortal and elf kind.

But she had been there all day, his people were alive and stable. Something about this produced an internal response he had not anticipated and did not immediately know what to do with. A response that had nothing to do with arrangements or white gems or the careful management of a useful pawn, and everything to do with the simple, stubborn fact of a mortal refusing to stand idle while others suffered.

He remained standing in the centre of the chamber for a long moment after the vambrace was gone, light moving faintly across the carved walls, the silence of the halls pressing in around him the way it always did. The space was complete, functional, beautiful in the particular way of things shaped by Elven hands over centuries and in the particular way of spaces built around something that was no longer in them, profoundly quiet.

There was correspondence on the table. There were reports from the patrol. There were thirty of his people who would need to be visited tomorrow, personally, each of them.

"I thought I ordered that nest to be destroyed not two moons past," Thranduil said.

"We cleared the forest as ordered, my lord," the captain said, without any alteration of expression that would suggest he found this sequence of events anything other than entirely expected. "But more spiders keep coming up from the south. They are spawning in the ruins of Dol Guldur. If we could kill them at their source—"

"That fortress lies beyond our borders," Thranduil said. He said it in the tone of something that had been said before and was going to be said again and had not changed between the first instance and this one. "Keep our lands clear of those foul creatures. That is your task."

"And when we drive them off, what then?" the captain said. "Will they not spread to other lands?"

Thranduil looked at the forest through the carved archway. At the darkness of it, the deep canopy, the particular quality of light that existed only in Mirkwood—half-light, the light of a forest that had been accumulating shadow for a very long time.

"Other lands are not my concern." He said "The fortunes of the world will rise and fall, but here in this kingdom, we will endure."

The captain inclined his head with the precision of someone who had his own opinion and was too professionally accomplished to show it. "The patrol rotations for the celebration—"

"Doubled on the western border," Thranduil said. "The eastern sector can manage with current numbers. Nothing comes through on the eastern road without my hear of it." He looked at the forest a moment longer. "Is that clear?"

"Entirely, my lord," the captain said, and withdrew.

Thranduil stood in the archway with the forest below him and the torchlight behind him and thought about several things in the particular ordered way he thought about things when the immediate business had been addressed and the space after it was briefly unoccupied. The celebration was three days away, which was not a long time and simultaneously a long time, depending on the scale of measurement in use.

The court was already in the early stages of preparation—he could feel it in the Halls the way he could feel most things in his kingdom, a shift in the quality of the air, a changed tenor to the movement through the corridors.

He thought about the patrol rotations and the spider nests and the darkness in the south that had been building with the slow certainty of a tide for several decades now.

Then, and this was not something he had intended to think about, he thought about the woman.

She was still wearing the green dress from the dwarves. He had noted this each day—had filed it each morning with the same flat attention he applied to everything that fell into the category of persistent anomaly and had concluded, approximately four days ago, that it was intentional rather than negligence. Which made it something else. Which made it, in the particular vocabulary of someone who had spent several thousand years reading people and situations with the same eye, a position.

A small one. Quietly held. But nevertheless held.

He turned from the archway and went back into the Halls, and did not examine why the thought produced the specific texture it did, which was something between recognition and amusement and a third that hummed.

The Halls were different, you'd noticed it over the course of the morning—a quality of increased activity that was hard to pin down because none of the individual components of it were dramatic. The elves were still elves, which meant the collective activity was still characterised by the Elvish register of everything, quiet, composed, moving with the unhurried grace that seemed to be an architectural feature rather than a learned behaviour. But there were more of them in the open corridors than usual. Voices in Sindarin from previously quiet passages. A group of elves in the garden alcove, doing something to the moss that appeared to involve making it more presentable, which you hadn't been aware moss could be made more presentable and which seemed to involve a great deal of elves and a lot of focused attention.

You sat on the carved window seat in your room and watched the increased traffic in the corridor outside and tried to deduce the pattern.

Your mind was mostly elsewhere. It went to the dwarves in the way it always went to the dwarves—automatically, without the decision to do it, arriving there and working through the same series of thoughts in the same order. Surely they would have cleared Mirkwood by now. Probably. Thorin would have the map and the knowledge that lived in the map, Balin would be keeping the accounts. Kíli would be—you hoped Kíli was being careful, and pressed this hope firmly into something that wasn't quite prayer but was adjacent to it and had been residing in that adjacency for several weeks.

The knock at the door arrived without warning, in the sense that you had been expecting it from the sound of footsteps and had simply failed to act on the information.

Neniel entered with a tray balanced on one arm and a particular quality of expression that was not quite pleased with herself but had the right to be. On the tray, alongside what appeared to be a late-morning arrangement of food and a faintly spiced drink, was a small collection of objects that you recognised before she'd fully entered the room.

Your vial of oil. The stub of charcoal from Ori, the last piece he'd supplied you, short now, worn to something barely functional but still present. A small piece of dried fruit, considerably more desiccated than it had been in your pocket during the march but recognisably itself. Your items that had been confiscated in the forest clearing and that you had not expected to see again.

You were off the window seat before Neniel had reached the table.

"How—" you started.

"The Elvenking," Neniel said, with the simple directness of someone identifying a cause without elaborating on the process. She set the tray down and looked at you looking at the returned items, and something in her expression had the quality of someone watching something they consider pleasing from a distance. "He had me retrieve them from the stores."

You picked up the vial. The familiar weight of it in your palm, the glass, the cork. You turned it over and the oil inside moved. "Really ?" you said. "He just gave it back."

"Yes," Neniel said.

You held the vial and the charcoal and the fruit and the feeling that arrived was disproportionate to the objects, which were small, and entirely proportionate to what the objects represented, which was not small at all.

"Thank you," you said, to Neniel, because she had brought them, and because the alternative was saying it to Thranduil to his face and you hadn't decided how you felt about that yet.

Neniel inclined her head. Then, with the specific quality of someone who has done the pleasant part and is now moving to the pending business she said. "About this evening—"

"I'm wearing the green dress," you said.

"Of course, I understand your preference however," Neniel said, with the patience of a person who has anticipated this and prepared accordingly. "I wondered—" She moved to the carved chest at the foot of the bed, and from it she produced, with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been placed there ahead of time, something you'd managed not to look at since Neniel had put it there. A dress, but not in the colours you'd been refusing. Different—a soft grey-green, the colour of a forest floor in the rain-light, the fabric moving in her hands with the quality of something made for movement. The embroidery at the neckline was the same carved-branch motif that appeared throughout the halls, but understated, present without announcing itself.

"There is a celebration tonight," Neniel said, in the tone of someone providing information without attaching an agenda to it. "Mereth Nuin Giliath, the whole of the kingdom attends." She paused, in the specific way of someone who has more to say. "It is held outside. It will be cold, after dark." She offered the dress again, the slight extension of it in her hands, the grey-green fabric catching the light. "Something warmer would only be practical."

You looked at the dress. At the vial of oil in your other hand. At the charcoal stub, then down at the green dress from Radagast, which had been washed twice and kept its shape and continued to be the most comfortable thing you'd worn since your arrival.

"Mereth Nuin Giliath?" you said, trying the words.

"Festival of Starlight," Neniel said, because she'd correctly identified that you'd been asking rather than repeating. "All light is sacred to the Eldar, but the Wood Elves love best the light of the stars." Something moved in her expression when she said it—not the professional courtesy, something else, warmer and more personal, the quality of someone talking about something they actually loved. "It is the most beautiful celebration of the year."

You looked at the dress in her hands.

Practical. You were going outside and it would be cold and you were already cold in the green dress on most evenings and the grey-green fabric was clearly warmer and the embroidery was, if you were being honest with yourself, genuinely beautiful in a way you'd have admired without reservation if you'd seen it somewhere else.

And the company wasn't here to see what you were wearing. And wearing something warm would only be reasonable, you could almost hear Balin's voice. And Thranduil had sent back the vial and the charcoal and the fruit, maybe one concession would be alright.

"Mm," you said, and the word came out with the slight quality of someone setting down something they'd been holding for a while. "Alright. But just for tonight."

Neniel's expression produced a very small, very composed, entirely professional satisfaction. "Of course." she said.

Outside the great carved doors of the Halls of the Woodland Realm, the world was wide open and cold and astonishing.

The feast had been arranged on the broad terraced clearing that extended from the main entrance—tables set with the same extraordinary care as the indoor dining, but here without walls, without ceiling, without any enclosure except the forest on all sides and the sky above, and the sky above was—you stopped walking when you came through the doors and looked up.

You had seen the stars, in this world. You had been sleeping outside for months before you'd arrived in the Halls, and the stars had been present every clear night, the astonishing profusion of them, the solid band rather than a theoretical concept. You thought you'd calibrated to them. You thought they'd stopped being able to surprise you.

The sky over Mirkwood's clearing on the night of Mereth Nuin Giliath was a different argument entirely, It was the quality of the air, or the particular clarity that existed above the forest, or simply the night that had been chosen for its luminosity—but the stars were doing something that went beyond mere quantity. They were brilliant in the specific way of a light source that was not reflecting but generating, each one with a presence rather than merely a point, and the cumulative effect of them on the clearing below was real and perceptible, an actual starlight, illumination that owed nothing to the torches and lanterns of the feast tables. The air smelled of cold pine and something sweet that was the Elvish food from the tables and something else that was simply the forest at its best.

Elves moved through the space with the particular quality they had—which was the same quality they had always, except more so, the composure and grace intact but the surface of it lightened, like a held breath released. Children wove between the adults with a freedom that surprised you—you hadn't seen Elvish children before, had not thought about them, and the sight of them now was startling and charming in equal measure, small and pointed-eared, entirely comfortable in this world in the way of beings who had always belonged in it.

You stood near the edge of the clearing, near the doors and watched a family near the longest table—a father lifting a small child to see something on the table's surface, the child's hand coming up to point at something with the complete, focused delight of small people encountering marvels. The father's hand steadying the child's back. The easy, specific quality of it.

The bead in your braid was cold, and then warm where your neck warmed it, and you pressed your thumb against it through the hair and thought about Thorin with Fíli and Kíli, that familial bond that went far beyond duty, then of Balin and then stopped thinking about Balin because if you started you wouldn't stop.

"You must be the guest of the Woodland Realm."

The voice came from your left, and you turned to find an elf who had not been there a moment before—or who had been, and you hadn't registered—standing with the composed, direct courtesy of someone making an introduction of himself through the specifics of the greeting. His hand came to his chest, palm flat, his head inclining in the formal motion you'd seen used between elves of equal or acknowledged standing. Blond hair, pale, falling straight—the Mirkwood elves were predominantly sandy-haired, the difference was noticeable, a visual specificity that placed him differently even before anything else.

"I had heard there was someone—unusual—in our residence."

"That's one word for it," you said.

"Word has reached me of the stir you caused at dinner," he said, and the quality of his tone on this was not quite what you'd expected—not the composed, faintly distant assessment of most of the court but something with more directness in it, more genuine curiosity.

"Which dinner," you said, because this was becoming a relevant disambiguation.

Something moved in his expression that was not quite a smile but had a smile's energy behind it. "You objected to a word," he said. "Rather forcefully I'm told."

"The word deserved objecting to," you said.

"Perhaps," he said, which was more concession than you'd received from most on this subject, and you looked at him sideways with the slight recalibration of someone revising an expectation.

"I have heard a number of stories about you," he said. Not as flattery, as a statement of fact.

"Apparently I've made an impression," you said, which was the most honest summary of your time in the Halls you'd managed.

The corner of his mouth moved fractionally. "I heard you called someone dense in Khuzdul at dinner and attempted to pass it off as a compliment," he said, which confirmed that whatever impression you'd made, the specifics of it had traveled.

"The translation was imperfect," you said.

"The intention was quite clear," he said, and his tone had the dry quality of someone who found this more entertaining than they were going to fully indicate. He looked at the feast, at the children at the stars.

"It is a fine night," he said, apparently returning to neutral territory.

You followed his gaze to the family near the table. The child had been set down and was now engaged in some purposeful activity near the table's edge that the father was monitoring with the patient, alert attention of a person who knows exactly how long they have before intervention is required. "It makes me think of family," you said, and then felt the specific vulnerability of having said something true without deciding to.

"Yes," the blond elf said. He was watching the same scene. "Reminds me of the royal family—" He seemed to catch himself something shuttering in his expression, like a curtain firmly shut to a winters night. "—although that was many moons ago."

"I can't quite imagine the Elvenking with a family," you said, with the tone of someone musing aloud rather than making a pointed observation. "I mean—he's—" You gestured, because the end of the sentence required a word you didn't have.

The elf looked at you for a moment. Then looked beyond you and you followed his gaze to where it had landed—the platform at the top of the stone steps, where Thranduil had appeared.

The Elvenking arrived the way he arrived everywhere—fully, completely, without any sense of having been absent and then present but simply the sense that the space had acquired its correct occupant. The robes tonight were different from the council chamber or the dinner hall—still the layered, constructed quality of everything he wore, but more of it, the occasion having been dressed for with the specific, composed intention of a elf who understood that what he wore was also what his kingdom saw when it looked at him.

The crown of branches was different too—not so everyday but something with more to it, the branches more elaborate, worked with something that caught the starlight from above and the lantern light from below and produced a quality between the two.

He moved down the steps and through his people, and his people opened a path without appearing to do so, the gathering simply rearranging itself to accommodate him in the way that gatherings did around people who had been the centre of them for a very long time.

You watched Thranduil move through the celebration with the composed, practiced attention of someone who had attended this festival in this forest under these stars for longer than you could calculate, and who moved through his own kingdom with the quality of water moving through stone—imposing and equally inherent.

"I can't envision anyone able to put up with his attitude long enough for conception." You said it entiely without thought, with the honest quality of someone who had spent several weeks in proximity to Thranduil and had developed opinions about him in the way you developed opinions about weather—through direct and repeated experience, not through any particular animosity.

The blond elf turned to look at you, the look he gave had a quality you registered approximately two seconds after it landed—a quality that was not offended, exactly, but was several degrees cooler then his previous expression, the very specifically quality of someone who has just heard something said about a subject considerably more honest than the speaker has understood it to be. His eyes held yours for a moment with that quality. Then he looked, with the deliberate care of someone selecting a different direction, at the feast.

"The forest patrols are particularly active at this time of year," he said.

Something about the redirection had a shape. You looked at him sideways and found his profile entirely composed, the mild, forward-facing expression of someone who has said what they intended to say and will not be elaborating.

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Filed the exchange in the category of things to think about later and went back to looking at the stars.

The feast was generous and various and the Elvish instinct for presentation had been applied to the outdoor tables with the same care as the indoor ones, the effect of it in the starlight producing a quality that you kept catching out of the corner of your eye and then looking at directly and finding just as good. You ate more than you had at most of the indoor dinners, which you attributed to the air and the cold and the residual relief of being outside.

As night wore on the tables begun to clear in the particular unhurried way of a gathering that had nowhere to be and was in no hurry to stop being itself.

The food had moved into its later stages—the substantial dishes replaced with smaller things, sweeter things, the particular Elvish confections that had no obvious category in any framework you'd brought with you from your previous life, things made of honey and dried fruit and something that tasted faintly of pine and which you'd eaten three of before deciding to stop keeping count. The wine had been replaced at your end of the table by something warm and spiced that smelled of winter and tasted of it, and which you'd accepted with the specific gratitude of someone who had been wanting something with warmth for the last hour and was not too proud about it.

The elves around you had changed configuration as the evening moved—different people at different stages of the celebration finding different places to be, the gathering breathing and rearranging itself with the natural, gradual quality of something that had been doing this for a very long time and knew its own rhythms. Some had moved toward the outer edges of the cleared space, where the forest proper was visible between the trunks in the deep dark, and were engaged in the kind of low, continuous conversation that looked from the outside like the conversation of people who had been talking to each other for centuries and had not yet run out of things to say.

Others had gathered at the centre, you noticed the shift in attention before you identified its source—a gradual, distributed turning of faces toward a specific point in the clearing, not dramatic, not the unanimous snap of a crowd responding to something loud, but the slower, more specific reorientation of people being drawn toward something worth drawing toward.

Three elves had seated themselves in the open space between the tables. On chairs—in the particular self-contained way elves arranged themselves on surfaces. They were not young, or rather they had the quality of age that was different from the lined, specific ageing of men or dwarves—a depth in them, a layering visible in the quality of their stillness, the way certain stones looked different from others not in any surface feature but in some quality of what they were made of.

One of them had an instrument—something stringed, smaller than a lute, shaped differently, and the sound it produced when he began to play it was not the sound you associated with stringed instruments from your own world. Quieter, more complex, the overtones of it reached further than the fundamental note, hanging in the cold air above the clearing and mixing with the sound of the lanterns in the light breeze from the forest.

The gathering went quiet, not all at once. Progressively, in widening circles from the centre, the way ripples moved—the conversations closest to the three elves dropping first, and then the ones adjacent to those, and then the ones at the edges of the cleared space, until the clearing held only the sound of the instrument and the forest beyond and the very distant sound of the falls, somewhere behind the stone walls of the Halls.

Then one of the three began to speak, the language was Sindarin. You knew this much—you had been hearing Sindarin for weeks, had developed a sensitivity to its liquid sounds and its rhythms without acquiring its vocabulary, the way you'd developed sensitivity to the quality of Khuzdul through months of lessons and conversation without ever being close to fluent. You could not follow the words. But the words, in this context and in this quality of attention, were not the only thing that was communicating.

The story—you were relatively certain it was a story—as it had the shape of one, the pacing of one, the specific architecture of something that had been told before and was being told again not because the audience didn't know it but because the telling itself was the thing. Their voice moved through registers that were different from conversational Sindarin, more deliberate, more structured, each phrase arriving at a particular weight before the next one built on it. The instrument wove through the voice in the specific way of accompaniment that had been composed for the purpose rather than improvised alongside it—matching the phrasing, falling silent in the silences, carrying the emotional load of the moments the voice left space for.

You were standing near the edge of the clearing, at the point where the festival gave way to the tree line, with your arms wrapped around yourself more from the cool air than from any defensive instinct, when Thranduil arrived at your peripheral vision.

He did not arrive the way most people arrived—with sound, with approach, with the preparatory signals that allowed adjustment. He arrived, which was a quality of his movement that you had by now accepted as simply one of his characteristics, like the dry register and the composed expression and the way he occupied space as though the space was aware of being occupied by him.

He stopped beside you and looked at the feast with the same quality he generally looked at things—present, attentive, the management of his expression exactly sufficient and no more.

"Good Evening," he said, as his eyes swept the length of your Elvish clothing in one pass.

"Neniel was persuasive," you retored.

"Neniel is professionally persistent," he said, which was not a correction but contained one.

You watched one of the elf children intercept a plate of something sweet from an attendant with the smooth efficiency of a small person who had identified an opportunity and moved on it. "What is the feast for, exactly?" you said. "Neniel said it was the Festival of Starlight but—"

"All light is sacred to us," Thranduil said. "The Eldar were born under stars, before the sun existed. Before the moon. The stars were the first light, and the Wood Elves remember that with more fidelity than most." He paused. "This festival is very old, older than this forest. We carry it wherever we go."

You looked at the stars. "That's—" you started, and then found, again, the same problem of all endings being either too much or too little, and let it sit.

Thranduil looked at you sideways, with the specific quality that meant he had noticed something.

"You are wearing something other than the dwarvish bequest," he said.

The feeling arrived then—the specific, low-grade guilt that had been sitting at the edge of the evening since you'd put the green dress on, the particular feeling of a small betrayal of something that mattered. Radagast's dress, folded in the chest at the foot of your bed. The journey it was connected to. The company that had given it its meaning. You looked at the fabric of the green sleeve and felt the guilt sharpen.

"It's cold," you said.

"Yes," he said.

"Don't," you said.

One eyebrow rose by increments, which you understood was Thranduil's way of delivering a question.

"You were about to say something," you said, "and I'm asking you not to, because I'm already annoyed at myself about it and I don't need—"

"I was going to say," Thranduil said, with the composed, precise quality of a elf completing a sentence he had decided on before you'd finished objecting to it, "that wearing something for warmth and comfort is not a disservice to the Gonnhirrim."

Thranduil looked at your expression. Then, with the quality of someone who had been watching people manage things for a very long time and had developed a sensitivity to the signs of it. "Your commitment to them is not diminished," he said, "by you being warm."

You looked at him. At the grey-green fabric over your arms. At the starlight on the feast tables and the children weaving between the adults and the forest at the edge of the clearing. His gaze moved, very briefly, across you. Not a lengthy assessment — a moment, the kind of look that was so fast it almost didn't register and registered completely. Something shifted in it, settled.

"They would think considerably more of you for surviving long enough to see them again." he said. Not gently—Thranduil was never gentle, in the way of a bell that cannot ring softly, only struck with varying degrees of force. But with the specific quality of something actually meant.

The bead was warm at on your skin..

"The fabric is Elvish," you said, which was not agreement and was not exactly objection either, something in the middle that acknowledged the point without fully conceding it.

"The craftsmanship is Elvish," Thranduil agreed, with the composure of someone accepting a partial concession as entirely sufficient. "The person wearing it is whatever they decide they are." He looked at the stars, and there was something in the looking—the specific quality of someone who had been looking at these particular stars for a very long time and had not run out of things to see in them. "Which remains, I find, an interesting question."

You watched the feast. The music continued, quiet and particular. One of the children had fallen asleep against a tree at the edge of the clearing with the total unconscious commitment of small people, and an adult had placed a folded cloth beneath the small head without waking them.

"Did you know the other elf," you said, then corrected yourself. "The blond one, I havent seen him before."

The silence that followed had a shape.

"Ah, yes he returned this morning," Thranduil said, "from patrol." He said it with the flat, informational quality of a statement that was not providing context and was providing all of it.

You looked at him. At the profile of him, the pale light of the stars on the silver-white of his hair and the composed, specific lines of his face. At the crown of branches, dark against the sky. You stood in the particular quality of silence that had developed between you over weeks of shared dinners and reluctant coexistence—not comfortable exactly, never quite comfortable, but navigable. A known territory with known features.

Then, from somewhere behind you, footsteps on the stone—lighter than the general movement of the celebration, more purposeful, a particular direction.

"Ada."

The elf who had been beside you came to stand at the edge of the table, his hand went to his chest and he inclined his head in the greeting of the Woodland Realm, he looked at Thranduil with an expression that was—different from the one he'd been wearing all evening, different from anything he'd shown during conversation or the subject change that had been so odd in its precision.

You looked at the elf. At Thranduil. At the elf, at the word that was still in the air.

"Ada?" you said, and your voice came out with the quality of someone repeating something while the brain behind the voice caught up.

"What does—Is that sindarin for King ?"

Thranduil looked at you with an expression that had, buried extremely far underneath its composed surface, something that was not quite amusement and was in the general vicinity of it.

The elf—the blond one, the one you'd spent a relative portion of the evening with, the one you'd told that you didn't think anyone could deal with Thranduil's attitude—looked at you with an expression that was managing something considerably more complicated than any of the ones he'd shown earlier.

"Ada," Thranduil said, with the specific, dry patience of a elf presenting information to someone who had asked for it, "means father."

The Elf placed his hand over his heart. Inclined his head.

"I did not introduce myself earlier," he said. "I am Legolas. Son of Thranduil." He said it plainly, with the quality of someone presenting information that they're aware was previously withheld and are choosing not to pretend otherwise.

You looked at him. At the hand over his heart, still there, the formal introduction still in progress, waiting for its completion.

You put your own hand to your chest—you'd watched this enough times by now to do it approximately correctly, the angle of it, the inclination—and gave him your name.

The festival continued around you. The lanterns moved in the cold night air. The stars overhead were very large and very bright and entirely unconcerned with the specific social catastrophe currently unfolding from at the tree line.

You looked at Legolas who you'd been sitting next to.

You looked at Thranduil.

You looked back at Legolas

Your mouth opened.

"Oh, well—that's—yes," you floundered looking around like a small creature who had just realized water was rising around them.

You sat in it, or rather you'd been sitting in it and then lying in it, your back against the moss with your arms folded across your middle and the sound of the water moving across stone filling the space. You'd been thinking about the company—the particular, low-grade, constant thinking about the company that had occupied most of your days in the way a bruise occupied a hand, always there when you pressed on it and pressable at any moment. Whether Balin had been filling the ledger. Whether Kíli was being careful. Whether Bombur had adequate provisions and whether Ori was writing everything down and whether Thorin—

You closed your eyes, your fingers moved across Balin's bead.

The water moved across the stone, the moss was very soft.

The dream had the quality of something that had been getting worse over time through repetition rather than escalation—not more dramatic each night but more familiar, which was somehow more terrible. The brain, you'd read somewhere in a life that felt very far away now, processed fear differently when the fear was recognisable. When the fear was yours, specific, built from things you already knew.

You knew the company, you knew the way they moved, the way they positioned themselves in a fight, or at rest, the particular geography of each person's face under stress. The dream used all of it.

It didn't give you plot. It didn't give you a sequence of events with a logic to it. It gave you fragments— the same fragments each time, arranged in the same order, Balin's ledger closed on the ground, undamaged with no one beside it. The specific's of Bofur's hat without Bofur in it. Kíli's bow with the string cut. And Thorin—not Thorin himself, just his coat, the heavy dark coat, lying on stone, and the stone was dark with something that wasn't shadow.

Erebor in the dream was not the Erebor that Thorin had described—it was larger, less specific, the architectural memory of a hundred things Thorin had told you assembled into something that was correct in feeling but wrong in detail, the way remembered but unseen places always were. The great pillars were there, the stone floors, the quality of light that came from somewhere below and threw colours no surface language had names for.

Then the fire, the fire in the dream was always the same—not the trolls' fire, but something larger and more total, the specific fire of something that had been living in the mountain and knew what fire could do in an enclosed space.

You watched it in the dream the way you watched all the worst things, which was from a distance that felt safe and wasn't, because in dreams distance was not protection, in dreams you could be across the hall and still be in the centre of it.

The company in the dream was always there when the fire came, and in the dream you could always see them clearly—each face specific and present in the way that proved the brain had catalogued them all properly — and in the dream you watched the fire find them.

You watched it find Bofur.

You watched it find Kíli.

You watched, and the dream made you watch, and you had no hands in the dream to do anything with and no voice to call with and the only thing you could do was stay present in the watching and feel it happen, and you felt it happen, and—

You woke up to the sound of water moving across stone and lay in the moss for a moment with your heart running too fast and the particular cold that nightmare-waking always left in your hands, and stared at the carved ceiling of the garden alcove and breathed until the breathing was regular and the cold was less.

Three nights now.

Same sequence.

Same ending.

You pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes and stayed in the dark behind them.

Galion walked at his usual pace along the upper walkway—the administrative route, the one that connected the council chamber to the east correspondence rooms, which he walked at this hour every day with the regularity of a person for whom routine was not a preference but a professional instrument. The walkway ran above the garden alcove, with a carved balustrade that gave a clear sightline down into it if one happened to look, which Galion did because he looked at most things in the Halls with the habitual, comprehensive attention of someone who had been Thranduil's chief steward for long enough that his attention had become structural.

He looked down, you were in the moss, asleep—had been asleep when he'd passed twenty minutes prior, curled on your side with your hands folded near your face in the particular quality of someone who'd fallen asleep without intending to. You were still in that position now, except the quality of the stillness had changed.

You were still asleep. He could see your breathing. But the stillness had become the rigid, held quality of someone whose sleep had turned against them—the small, involuntary movements of a face working through something that wasn't rest, the way your hands had tightened against each other. The sound you made was quiet, but the walkway carried sound from the alcove below with the particular acoustics of a space that had not been designed with privacy in mind, and what reached him was not words but the quality of distress compressed into barely-sound by a person who was trying, even in sleep, not to make noise.

Galion watched for a moment. Then continued along the walkway at his usual pace, adjusting his mental schedule by approximately fifteen minutes.

Thranduil was at the window of the council chamber when Galion entered—not working, not reviewing the correspondence that sat in its precise stack on the table, simply at the window with the quality of a elf who had been there for some time and had not moved because movement had not seemed necessary. He turned when Galion came in, with the unhurried attention of someone who processed information at a pace entirely their own.

"The guest," Galion said, choosing the word with the care he brought to most words in Thranduil's presence.

"What of her."

"She fell asleep in the alcove garden, I believe she's having some manner of distress in her sleep." Galion said, with the specific economy of a steward who had reported to the Elvenking for thousands of years and understood what level of detail was useful and what was not. "She has the quality of someone who is not sleeping well."

Thranduil did not respond immediately. Instead choosing to cast his eye over the correspondence, pick a single report read it and return it to the pile. The report detailed—in Thranduil's view, as it always seemed to of late, reasons the name Mirkwood was earned by more than age.

"This is not the first time?" he said.

Galion considered. "The other night she was at the window for several hours. In her room, Neniel mentioned it."

Thranduil said nothing.

"She has not complained," Galion added. "She has not asked for anything on this front."

"No," Thranduil said. "She wouldn't." He said it in the tone of a elf making an observation rather than a judgment, the quality of someone who had been paying attention and filing things away and had arrived at a conclusion without making a production of the process.

"I thought you should know," Galion said, which was not an explanation of why he thought this but communicated it adequately.

Thranduil returned his gaze to the correspondence, was still for a moment.

"That will be all."

Galion withdrew in the manner of a man who had done what he'd come to do and was content to leave the rest of it to the relevant party.

Thranduil sat after he left and thought about several things. He thought about the dwarves' provisions, which had been carefully calculated to be adequate and no more—enough to demonstrate good faith, not enough to invite the interpretation that he had been generous. He thought about Erebor, and the white gems, and the slow, certain arithmetic of waiting. He thought about the woman asleep in the moss, with the quality of someone who had been trying not to make noise while her sleep turned against her, and the way the dwarves had stood in the throne room when she had been standing in it.

He had observed the bead in her hair, when she'd stood before him at the end. The Dwarven craft of it, the specific small weight of it at the end of a braid.

He had not remarked upon it. He'd filed it, as he filed most things, in the category of information that was not immediately useful but might become so.

There was a preparation he knew of. He'd had occasion to use it himself, in periods of history that he filed in a different category entirely and did not take out to examine unless he had a reason.

Another dress had been folded on the end of your bed again this morning. You unfolded it, held it up, considered it with the detached assessment of someone evaluating an argument they were not going to be persuaded by, refolded it, and placed it back where it had been.

You'd dressed in Radagast's green dress, which had been laundered twice now while you slept by elves who clearly found the garment unimpressive but who were professional enough not to say so, you'd worn it to breakfast, and you were wearing it now, and you were going to keep wearing it in the same spirit in which you'd worn it every day since your arrival.

It wasn't a grand stand, you were clear-eyed about this—it wasn't going to change anything, it wasn't a meaningful act of resistance in any scale that mattered, the fate of the world did not hinge on your choice of clothing. But it was yours. Radagast had given it to you—Radagast, who had given Sebastian's small family a home in his garden and talked to animals with the same quality of attention he gave to people, who had pressed the vial of oil into your hand. The dress was connected to that, to the journey, to the company, your company, to the specific sequence of events that had brought you here, and the Elvenking's halls could provide any number of beautifully made Elvish garments in colors calibrated to their specific aesthetic, and you were not going to wear any of them.

Neniel had raised the subject at least once a day since the company had left. She raised it now, standing in the doorway of your room with the folded blue dress over her arm and the expression of a person who had been professionally patient about something for a significant number of days and was exercising this patience with visible and considerable effort.

"Please," she said. "The evening meal—"

"I'm fine in this," you said.

"The Elvenking's court—"

"Has seen me in this dress for days and survived the experience," you said. "I think they'll manage another evening."

Neniel looked at the dress in her arms. At you back to the dress. The expression she settled on was one you'd come to read as I have done what I can and the rest is not my responsibility, and she withdrew with a courtesy that was flawlessly maintained regardless.

You looked at the folded blue dress on the end of your bed. You picked it up, with the same detached consideration as the morning, refolded it, and put it in the carved chest that had arrived at the foot of the bed, under several other things.

Dining had established its own tedious rhythm, you'd mapped it over the nights you'd been sitting in it—who sat where, who spoke to whom, which topics circulated and which ones appeared and then were redirected with the specific conversational skill of people who'd been managing the same social dynamics for centuries. The food remained extraordinary, which was the one unambiguous positive you could identify about dinner in the Halls of the Woodland Realm. The wine remained present, which you managed by the simple and effective method of turning your cup face-down before it was filled, which had stopped producing visible reaction on the faces nearest you approximately three nights ago and was now simply an established fact about the unusual guest.

Tonight's dinner had been proceeding on its established course—a discussion of conditions in the boarder part if the forest, which was apparently significant in ways you were catching the shape of but not the detail, a long exchange between two elves at the far end of the table about something in Sindarin that you'd given up trying to follow, a pleasant enough conversation with the elf to your right about the garden alcove, they turned out to have some involvement in the cultivation of the moss and expressed opinions about it with more warmth than you'd encountered from most of the Elves you'd met thus far.

Then someone at the far end of the table made a remark about the forest's conditions being further complicated by the arrival of bothersome Naugrim.

The word landed at the table and you looked at your plate, it was used again, by someone else, a different context—Naugrim, said with the specific tone of someone referencing a category they found moderately inconvenient.

You ate a bite. Set your fork down, picked it up.

"What does that word actually mean?" you said.

The conversation near you didn't stop immediately—a few exchanges completed themselves before the question propagated down the table to the places it needed to reach, and then the quality of attention shifted, the specific attention of people who have had a social temperature change without quite identifying the source.

The elf to your left, who had used the word most recently, looked at you with the mild, composed expression of someone who did not expect the question to be pointed. "Which word?"

"Naugrim," you said. "You keep using it to refer to dwarves. But what does it actually mean?"

A pause. The kind of pause that told you the question had arrived somewhere they hadn't been expecting it.

"It is an old word," the elf said, with the careful, measured tone of someone selecting the most neutral available framing. "It—"

"What does it mean," you said. Same volume, same register. But the underneath of it had changed, and the underneath of it was not asking for a history.

The elf looked at you. "It means—stunted people," they said, and had the specific grace to say it with a quality of acknowledgement, a slight lowering at the end of the phrase that was not quite discomfort but was its adjacent.

The dining hall was quiet in your immediate vicinity, you looked at the elf, at the table. At the wine cups and the extraordinary food and the carved pillars and the long, elegant faces of Thranduil's court arranged around you in their beauty and their competence and their stupid regal existence.

"Stunted," you said.

"It is—"

"They're shorter than you," you said. "That's all, they're shorter than elves—most things are shorter than elves, I'm shorter than elves and the word you use for them means stunted. In a hall where people use that word casually, at dinner, while discussing them, like they don't matter" You looked along the table, because you were not just talking to one person and everyone present knew it. "Do you hear how that sounds?"

No one answered immediately.

"Do you not have another word?" you said. "One that isn't—that doesn't—surely there's another word."

The elf to your left looked at the elf to their left, and neither of them said anything, and you looked at their silence and found it sufficient.

"It is simply the word," the elf said, with the mild confusion of someone who has not previously been asked to examine a thing they've used automatically for thousands of years. "It has always—"

"Right," you said.

You placed your napkin on the table. Stood up. Pushed your chair back with the movement of someone who has made a decision and is in the process of implementing it, and looked at the table—at the wine and the beautiful food and the elves in their beautiful clothes—and then at the doorway.

"Excuse me," you said.

Your chair made a sound on the stone floor. You moved away from the table with the direction of someone who has decided where they're going and is going there, as.you rounded one of the tables someone in your peripheral stood—you registered the movement, a scrape of chair, a figure rising—a hand came to your elbow.

You pulled your arm back, not violently or dramatically. Simply with the complete, certain withdrawal of a person who had decided they were leaving and was not going to be redirected, and you kept walking, and the doorway of the dining hall was ahead of you, and you went through it.

The corridor outside was cool and empty, you walked down it in the specific, contained way of someone moving on controlled fuel, the sound of your footsteps on the carved stone was the only sound in it, and you kept walking until the sound of the dining hall had fully retreated, then you stood in a section of corridor where two carved stone trees met overhead in an arch of interlocked branches, and you breathed.

The bead in your hair was warm against your skin.

Your room was dark by the time he came, you had not lit any lamps—the ambient light of the Halls was sufficient to navigate by and you hadn't wanted sufficient, you wanted the dark you'd sat in it for long enough that your eyes had adjusted and it had become simply the room in a different quality of light. You were on the window seat, your legs pulled up, your chin on your knees, in the position that had become your default for when you were thinking about things you didn't want to be thinking about.

"That was quite a display," said Thranduil, from the doorway.

"Please," You didn't turn your head. "Just go away."

He entered the room with the specific quality of his movement that occupied space without making noise—the particular self-possession of someone who had moved through thousands of rooms over thousands of years and had long since stopped needing to announce himself through footfall. He stopped some distance from the window seat. Far enough to be courteous. Close enough to be in conversation.

"No one has refused my escort before," he said.

"I didn't know it was your escort," you said. "I just needed to leave."

"I gathered," he said, with the dry quality that was his default register, the one that sat over everything he said like a temperature. "The table was watching."

"Maybe they'll think twice about their choice in words."

"Perhaps," he said, and his voice had the same quality as his expression—flat, dry, a verdict stated without inflection. He moved to the chair in the corner of the room and sat in it with the unself-conscious ease of someone who considered every chair in his halls available to him, which was objectively, accurate. "They will be discussing it for several days."

"Good," you said and meant it.

Something shifted, very slightly, at the corner of his mouth—not a smile, the precondition for a smile, the arrangement of the muscles that preceded one when other factors did not prevent it. "Your investment in their good opinion of you has been noted,"

"I wasn't—I was trying to make a point," you said.

"You made several," Thranduil said. "Most of them simultaneously." He looked at you with the composed, particular attention he brought to things he had decided were interesting. "When dealing with elves—I would suggest you remember— You cannot correct a belief that is thousands of years old in a single dinner conversation."

"I know," you said.

He was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone at a loss—Thranduil was never at a loss, you'd established this over these days of proximity—but the silence of someone making a selection from several available things to say. "The word bothers you," he said.

"Of course it bothers me." You scoffed.

"You traveled with them."

"I would still be traveling with them," you said, and the distinction arrived with less heat than the dinner had carried, but with more permanence. "They're my—" You stopped. Thought about Balin's hands in your hair, the gold bead, the word he'd given you. "They're my—" you started, stopped pressed your tongue to the roof of your mouth and re calibrated.

"And that word is—" You looked at the wall. "There's a difference between what a word means and what it means when you say it about someone. And you cannot pretend that word doesn't mean things that have nothing to do with their height."

Thranduil regarded you across the dim room. The light caught the silver of his hair at an angle that made it look different from how it looked in daylight, or what passed for it in the halls.

"You are giving me practical advice," he said, "on how to deal with the Elvish lords at your table."

"I'm telling you what they sound like from the outside," you said.

"And the outside has a useful vantage," he said, in the tone of someone not quite conceding a point and not quite dismissing it.

"It generally does," you said.

He looked at you for a moment with the composed, attentive expression that you'd stopped finding entirely unreadable—not that you could read it fully, but you'd begun to identify textures within it, the specific qualities of when he was thinking versus when he was deciding versus when he was performing composure over something else. This was the thinking one.

"When someone in my halls conducts themselves poorly," he said, "the prescribed strategy is to select a moment to address it that is not in the middle of the dining hall, in front of the remainder of the court." He paused. "This allows the correction without requiring the person corrected to defend their position publicly, at least initially."

You looked at him. "Is that actual advice?"

"It is what I would do, for a first offense." he said, which was not the same as acknowledging it was advice but was close enough.

"I didn't want to be strategic about it," you said. "I just wanted them to hear it."

"They heard it," he said. "They heard it in a way that means several of them will be more invested in disagreeing with you than examining whether you were right." He tilted his head, very slightly, the gesture of someone making a point they consider self-evident. "Effective protest and satisfying protest are not always the same thing."

You put your chin back on your knees. "It was satisfying," you said, to the window.

"So it would seem," he said, and the dry quality of it had, buried very far underneath it, something that was not quite warmth but had warmth as one of its components.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

He moved, then—not toward you but to the small table near the door, where he had set something down on arrival with the quiet of a person placing something with care. You turned to look, he was holding a stemmed glass of something—dark, red in the low light, the surface of it still.

He extended it toward you, his long fingers around the stem.

You dropped your head into your hands.

The groan was muffled but thorough. "I don't want any wine," you said, into your palms. "I really, really don't want anymore wine, you can just—"

"It is not wine," Thranduil said.

You looked at him over the tops of your fingers. At the glass. At the dark red contents of it. "It looks like wine."

"Many things look like other things, until properly examined." he said, with the patience of a elf who has made this observation several thousand times and is still making it.

"What is it."

"A sleeping draught," he said. "Prepared by the healers. It is herbal—at very low concentration, combined from three components that I will enumerate if that would reassure you, though I suspect you won't recognise any of them." He held the glass with the same composed, unhurried quality. "It will allow you to sleep without dreaming."

You looked at him, atthe glass. At him.

"You know about the nightmares," you said.

"I rule a kingdom," he said, which was not quite yes and contained it entirely. "Very little occurs in these halls without my awareness. It is a requirement."

You looked at the glass for a long moment. The dark red of it. The slight viscosity that was, now that he'd said it, different from wine—thicker, moving differently when he shifted the glass fractionally.

"If I drink that and don't wake up," you said, "I will be extremely annoyed."

"You will be unconscious," Thranduil said. "The annoyance will have to wait."

"That's not funny," you said.

"It wasn't intended to be," he said, and the quality of it suggested he was aware that it had been slightly funny and had no intention of confirming this.

You looked at the glass.

"Gonnhirrim," Thranduil said, as you reached out.

Your hand paused.

He said it again, deliberately, with the quality of a elf setting a word down for examination. "Gonnhirrim. It is what we also called them, when the name was given by people who had reason to think carefully about what they were naming." He paused. "It means masters of stone. Stone lords." He inclined his head, barely, the smallest possible inclination that still constituted one. "I thought you should know there is a alternative."

You looked at him. At the glass, the word Gonnhirrim that was sitting in the air of the room between you, warm and substantial, stone lords, and you thought about Balin's hands in the firelight of Beorn's house, the small knife moving through pale wood, and about the pillars of Erebor that were two hundred feet high.

You took the glass.

He turned and walked to the door, and his footsteps were as quiet leaving as they had been arriving behind him with the specific, soft sound of something well-made settling into its frame.

You held the glass and looked at it. The dark red. The slight viscosity. You turned this over and found that you believed him, which was either good judgment or the kind of faith that was indistinguishable from foolishness and decided that at a certain point you reached a level of exhaustion that the line between the two wasn't the most useful thing to map.

Gonnhirrim. Stone lords.

You took a mouthful. It tasted like something herbal and dark and faintly sweet, with the specific quality of something that had been prepared with knowledge rather than assembled—not unpleasant, not pleasant, simply purposeful.

You finished it, set the glass on the window seat beside you. Leaned your head back against the carved stone of the window frame and looked at the ceiling, felt the quality of the room beginning to change—not dramatically, not all at once, but the edges of things softening, the particular ambient hum of the stone settling into something that was not quite sound and not quite silence, the light going softer and deeper, your hands in your lap heavy and warm.

You thought about the company. About Balin's bead and Bofur's hat and Kíli's bow and Thorin's two fingers against the braid. About stone lords. About the way the moss in the garden alcove was thick enough to hold the impression of your shape after you'd gotten up.

Had you made things worse?

This was the question that had been pacing the room with you. It arrived every few minutes with the specific, patient persistence of a thought that knew you couldn't evict it.

Thranduil had been—angry was the word you kept coming back to, though it was inadequate. Not the hot, immediate anger of someone in a confrontation, but something older and more deliberate, the anger of someone who had found a situation failing to conform to their expectations and was deciding what to do about it. His face had shown almost none of it, his voice had shown almost none of it. But the quality of his silence on the walk back to your room had carried it, the specific, pressurised quality of contained things.

You turned at the far wall and walked back the other direction.

The dwarves were still down there. Balin was still down there, in the amber light. Kíli was still down there, arguing about Khuzdul with Fíli at a volume calibrated for cells. Thorin was still down there, standing, because Thorin was always standing, and the gap between them all and yourself felt longer then the company had traveled in total.

Had you made it worse.

You turned at the other wall.

In the upper reaches of the Halls, in the room of maps and records that Galion kept meticulously and that Thranduil used when he needed to look at things that required distance rather than proximity, the Elvenking stood with his back to the carved doorway and looked at a map of the Lonely Mountain.

Not an Elvish map. A dwarven one, very old, obtained through circumstances that were not the point. He had looked at it many times—it was the nature of kingdoms that bordered other lands to keep records of those in the peripheral and the Woodland Realm had shared a peripheral with a great many lands for long enough that the map predated most of the things currently troubling him.

The white gems were in there, perhaps in the deep storerooms below the treasury level, the ones Thrór had refused to entry to and the ones Thranduil had been trying, for the better part of a century, to think of a way to retrieve the gems from without open conflict.

He had been wrong, perhaps, about the woman.

He had assumed—reasonably, he maintained—that someone traveling with the company of Thorin Oakenshield was someone who possessed information worth having. He had not been wrong about that. She clearly knew more than she'd said.

What he had perhaps miscalculated was the nature of what she knew and the nature of what she would do with what she knew, which were different questions.

The dwarves' protectiveness of her was—admirable. The Elvenking had been reported on it from the moment they'd arrived, in the march and the division at the cells and the particular quality of the dwarf king's expression when he'd been walked away. He'd observed it again in the cells, the distribution of the company's attention and the specific way it oriented toward her. Not the protectiveness of dwarves toward a valued asset. The protectiveness of something else, something more fundamental and less calculated.

He looked at the map, then beyond it, at a specific section of carved stone where a tree had been rendered in the living rock by hands from an earlier age, and the looking had the quality of someone conducting an internal conversation that was not going well.

The white gems were what he wanted. Had wanted, the dwarves had been uncooperative about it, the specific, accumulated patience of wanting had outlasted most things he'd been patient about. He knew where they were. Knew they were in Erebor. Knew that Thorin Oakenshield was, against all reasonable probability, marching toward Erebor with thirteen dwarves, one woman and a burglar with the intention of doing something about the dragon.

Which meant the gems might move, might change hands, become available, in the specific sense of available to someone who had been waiting.

He had offered Thorin a trade. Thorin had refused with the specific quality of refusal that Thranduil had been watching dwarves deploy for thousands of years, the particular combination of pride and wound that made them refuse things that were in their own interest when the thing being offered came from a source they had decided, long ago, not to trust.

He had anticipated it, accounted for it, planned past it. What he had not anticipated was the woman, she was not what he'd expected.

He hadn't expected anything, which was the more accurate statement. He hadn't thought about her as a thing to expect things about — she was a complication, an unexpected variable in an already complex situation, someone who had arrived in the Halls in the company of dwarves and whose very nature and origin were, from his perspective, puzzling perhaps a question that Mithrandir could answer.

He'd had Galion make the appropriate inquiries through the appropriate channels. Mithrandir was not available for inquiries, which was entirely characteristic of Mithrandir.

But the dwarves, he stood and thought about the dwarves, which was not something he generally did voluntarily, but what he was thinking about was specific, the tension of a people watching something be done to someone they were protective of in a way that was not about politics or alliance or any of the reasons people were protective of useful persons.

The white haired one—specifically. Thranduil had seen a great many people manage a great many things over a great many years, and he had developed, over those years, a specific sensitivity to the difference between performed restraint and actual restraint, what that specific dwarf had been exercising had been actual restraint, the kind that cost something.

Thranduil turned, the dwarves were protective of her in the way that dwarves were protective of things they considered theirs—not possessively, in the way they were possessive about gold and craft, but in the specific way they were protective of their own blood. He had seen it before, in other contexts, other centuries. Dwarves did not form that kind of bond casually.

They did not form it at all unless they meant it, because dwarves, whatever their other qualities, did not dissemble about the things that mattered to them.

Which meant she mattered, he turned this over, and examined what he felt about it, and found that what he felt about it was—not comfortable, which was interesting, because comfort was not a metric he generally applied to strategic decisions, he put this aside. He considered the alternatives, and found himself casting each one aside which the same care his son had employed in choosing desserts in earlier centuries.

He turned this over with the patience of someone who had been turning difficult problems over for a very long time and had found that turning was usually more productive than forcing.

A different approach, perhaps.

He straightened. "Galion," he said, to the room, and Galion, who had been standing in the doorway long enough to have heard the quality of the silence and was prepared to be summoned, came forward.

"My lord."

Bilbo came through the door like smoke, that was the only way to describe it—he was simply in your room between one moment and the next, no preceding sound, no footsteps in the corridor that you'd have expected to hear. He was there with the particular quality of someone who had been somewhere very specific and had arrived from it, and his face had the compressed, focused energy of a person running on a plan.

You were at the far wall when he appeared, which meant you were mid-pace, and you stopped with the specific full-body arrest of someone whose nervous system had just received unexpected input for the fifth time in three days and was running out of gracious responses to it.

"Bilbo—"

"Quiet," he said.

"I am being quiet," you said, at a volume that was technically quiet and spiritually a shout. "Where have you been? I waited all night, I thought—"

"I know, I know I'm so sorry, there were complications." He crossed to you with the brisk, purposeful walk of a man on a timeline. "We need to move. Now—not later, now, while the change of guard is happening."

"The change of—" You looked at the carved window-opening, trying to gauge the time from the quality of the ambient light, which was exactly as uninformative as it always was because there were no windows. "It's early. It's much earlier than I usually—"

"That's rather the point," Bilbo said. "Come on."

"Bilbo." You put your hand on his arm. He looked at it and then at you with the specific, slightly impatient expression of a hobbit on a deadline. "Are you sure about this?"

"Yes," he said, and the confidence was still there—that same, strange, settled certainty that had no visible source. It sat on him differently than Bilbo's usual confidence, which came with visible working and footnotes. This was just—there. Bedrock. "You have to trust me."

"Alright," you said. "Let's go"

The corridors were different at this hour.

Not empty—they were never entirely empty—but the particular distribution of activity had shifted, the guard rotation producing its brief interval of transition, Bilbo moved through the passages with a confidence that was slightly alarming given that the passages were lit and he should, theoretically, have been worried about being visible to anyone at a moments notice. You stayed close behind him and matched his pace and tried to look like someone going somewhere for a reason.

Twice you passed corridors with elves. Both times Bilbo's step did something—barely perceptible, a quality of moving that was different for three seconds and then back to what it had been—and both times the elves' gaze slid past you both in the specific way that gazes sometimes dismissed what they were pointed at.

You filed this observation about Bilbo away next to the other observations about Bilbo and kept walking.

The third corridor was the one you didn't know, you'd committed the route to memory over your nights of navigation—the turn at the second arch, the change in the floor texture, the descent—and the third corridor didn't match any of your established landmarks, which meant Bilbo was taking a different way, and you were following on the basis of his impossible confidence and the deeply felt absence of better options.

You rounded a corner, your foot caught something—the edge of a step that the ambient light hadn't defined clearly enough, a slight rise in the floor where two stone sections met at an imperfect seam, something small and entirely sufficient—you went forward with the specific, helpless momentum of someone past the point of recovery.

You grabbed at Bilbo, and Bilbo came with you, the sound you made on the way down was not the graceful, suppressed near-miss you'd been aiming for but a small, startled yelp that bounced off the carved stone walls with more enthusiasm than the situation required.

The floor met you. You lay on it for a moment while your assessment of your own dignity completed its accounting.

"Are you—" Bilbo started.

"Fine," you said, into the floor. "I'm fine. Are you—"

"Shh."

"Don't—" You pushed yourself up to sitting and stopped.

On the floor, three inches from your knee, was a ring.

Small, plain gold—almost plain, the surface smooth and the colour deep, the quality of the metal registering even in dim light as something that was not ordinary even in its plainness. It lay on the stone with the particular stillness of an object that had been there and was now found, and you looked at it for the moment it took to establish that it existed, and then picked it up.

It sat in your palm, it was heavy, disproportionately so for its size, the weight of it wrong in the specific way of things that had more substance than their dimensions suggested. You turned it over, no markings on the outside visible in this light.

Plain, warm, oddly—you kept looking at it, you kept looking at it in the specific way of something that was occupying more of your attention than a small piece of jewellery had any right to, the way a sound could fill a room that should have been too big for it.

"Give that back," said Bilbo.

You looked up. His voice had a quality it didn't usually have—not quite anger, but something adjacent, something tighter and more specific than his ordinary register. His hand was extended, palm up, and his eyes were on the ring with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously, none of them entirely comfortable.

"Is it yours?" you said.

"Yes," he said, immediately and specifically.

You looked at the ring, the weight of it in your palm, the quality of the not-looking-away. "Sorry," you said, and held it out, and he took it from you with a speed and a care that was disproportionate to the object, tucking it somewhere in his weskit with a movement that closed around it possessively.

You were about to say something about this—not sure what, just that the moment had a texture that wanted to be addressed—when the sound of footsteps came around the far corner of the passage.

Two elves. Moving at pace, and their eyes, when they rounded the corner, found you immediately, and then found Bilbo beside you, and the calculation in those eyes happened fast.

"Tolo," said the lead guard.

The throne room had the same quality as the first time—held breath, old stone, the specific atmospheric weight of a room that meant something. But the quality of it now was different from the first time, because the first time you had arrived in it by escort and in chains, and this time you arrived in it with Bilbo beside you and the company of Thorin Oakenshield in front of you, and the sight of all of them—all of them, Kíli and Fíli and Balin and Dwalin and Bofur and Bombur and every single one, present and assembled and upright — did something to your chest that you hadn't expected and couldn't entirely contain.

Bilbo's hand found yours, briefly, in the way of someone who understood the feeling even if they couldn't fix the situation, and then was gone.

Thranduil descended, he came down from the throne with the same fluid, unhurried grace, and the room had arranged itself with the specific attention of an audience that understood the weight of what was happening. His expression was composed—more composed than it had been outside your room, the surface of it immaculate, whatever emotions had been pressing against it from underneath managed back entirely.

He looked at the company. At Bilbo. At you.

"I have been reconsidering my position," he said the throne room absorbed the sentence and was quiet.

"The company of Thorin Oakenshield came to these halls in—let us say, circumstances of mutual misunderstanding." His voice was the voice of a Elf being precise. "I have provided for you here, and I find that further custody serves no purpose I had intended for it." He made a small gesture to the right, and at the edge of the room you registered, for the first time, packs, travel supplies, organised with Elvish attention to detail, more thorough than anything the company had arrived with.

"I am prepared to release this company. With provisions. With my blessing on the road east." The silence in the room was the silence of people deciding whether to trust what they were hearing.

You looked at Thorin. He was looking at Thranduil with the expression he had for things he hadn't finished calculating—not disbelieving, but not yet believing either, holding the sentence at arm's length and examining it.

Bilbo was very still beside you—it's over—it's almost over, we can go. You thought

The relief of it was enormous and immediate. It moved through you in a single, sweeping wave that left your knees unsteady and your lungs suddenly too full. You were already thinking about the road—about the particular sound of fourteen sets of boots and one pair of hobbit feet finding their rhythm again, about Balin’s ledger tucked in his pack and the quiet satisfaction you took in updating it with him at the end of each day, about Bofur’s hat sitting at its permanent ridiculous angle and the way he would tip it to you when he caught you looking.

You thought of the nights still ahead of you, of Thorin’s voice low and certain when he spoke of Erebor under the stars, of the mountain growing from a story into a shape on the horizon. The future arranged itself in front of you with perfect, uncomplicated clarity, the journey resumed, these halls left behind them like a bad dream you would never have to revisit.

You let yourself stand inside that feeling. You let it settle. You almost smiled.

"I have," said Thranduil, "but one condition."

The words arrived in the throne room and the room contracted around it.

"The white gems of Lasgalen," he said. His eyes moved across the company and settled, not on Thorin. "When Erebor is reclaimed, they will be returned to me." A pause that was precisely calibrated. "As insurance of this arrangement—"

He stopped. Let the stopping do what it needed to do.

"You will remain," he said, and he was looking at you, "as a guest of the Woodland Realm. Until the gems are delivered."

For a moment you did not understand the sentence. The individual words were clear enough, but the meaning of them together slid off the surface of your mind and refused to take any sort of hold.

"Absolutely not—"

"You cannot just—"

"Thorin, tell him—" Kíli’s voice cut through the others, sharp and cracking with disbelief. “She’s coming with us, she’s part of the company, You don’t get to keep her like some—some—”

“Kíli,” Fíli tried, but his brother was already stepping forward, face flushed, the words tumbling out too fast.

“We won’t agree to this. No one would agree to this. You can’t just decide—”

Dwalin’s growl overlapped him, low and dangerous. “Over my dead—”

“—the nerve of it—” Glóin, sharp, already halfway into an argument about honour and guest-right and the precise ways an elf could be wrong.

Bofur’s voice rose above the others, rare and rough with anger, demanding to know what kind of bargain left one of their own behind. The protests tangled and climbed over one another, a rising knot of dwarven outrage compressed by the presence of the guards but not silenced by it. Somewhere in the noise Bilbo made a small, strangled sound. None of it quite reached you. You stood in the centre of it and felt the words 'you will remain' repeating themselves at a slight distance, as though they belonged to someone else’s conversation.

When the world came back into focus it did so with brutal clarity. You looked at the company—at their faces turned toward Thranduil and toward you, at the way Thorin still had not spoken and the practical truth arranged itself with the same cold efficiency the relief had used only moments before.

They could not stop, not for one person. The quest had already bent and strained under the weight of prisons and delays it might not survive another fracture. If they refused now, Thranduil would simply close them in the cells again and the road would end here, in these stone halls, for all of them. You understood it with a detached, almost clinical certainty, the only way any of them left was if you stayed.

Thorin said nothing, he stood in the centre of the company's noise and looked at Thranduil and the calculation that had been running behind his eyes since the beginning of the speech completed itself, and the completion of it showed in the specific, terrible stillness that came over his face.

"You would use her as—" he started, and his voice had the controlled, dangerous quality of someone who had found the word and was choosing to set it aside. "She is not a tool of negotiation."

"No," Thranduil agreed. The single word was cool, almost languid, delivered with the unhurried precision of the Elvenking, who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed.

"She is a guest, with every courtesy that designation implies." His gaze moved briefly over the company, dismissive, before returning to Thorin with that familiar, glacial poise.

"The road you mean to take is not kind. Dragons are not known for their discrimination, the lands between here and Erebor have grown less forgiving with every passing year. I am not requesting information she cannot give. I am not asking for allegiances she does not hold. I am asking only that she remain here, comfortably and safely, until the agreement is fulfilled." A faint, almost elegant tilt of his head. "Surely even a dwarf can see the mercy in that arrangement."

The word mercy landed with the particular dryness of something that might have been sincere and might have been contempt, and Thranduil offered no indication which.

"And if the agreement cannot be fulfilled?" Thorin said.

"Then we reassess," Thranduil replied, which was the most composed version of 'I have not yet decided the shape of your failure' you had ever heard.

He let the silence stretch for a measured beat before continuing, voice still even, still deliberate. "I have no interest in her suffering. Nor in seeing her caught between the greed of a dragon and the stubbornness of dwarves that have already lost much in their pursuit of Erebor. The Woodland Realm is not without its virtues, whatever your kind may claim." His eyes flicked, briefly, toward you—assessing and unreadable—before settling once more on Thorin.

"Consider it an act of prudence. Or of generosity. Whichever allows you to accept it with less noise."

"This is not—" Thorin stopped. His jaw moved. He looked at you.

You looked back at him. You had been looking at him since the condition landed—watching the calculation behind his eyes, watching the thing it arrived at, watching him look at you now with an expression that was doing the most compression you had ever seen a face do on a single emotion.

Go, you thought. You have to go.

He looked at you for a long moment, then he looked at the floor.

"Thorin." Balin's voice, quiet and immediate, from directly behind him. "No." Two syllables, specific and clear, with the particular weight of a word that was not a suggestion. "Thorin, you cannot—"

"We have no choice, Balin," Thorin said. His voice was very controlled. "You know we have no choice."

"We have—"

"The quest cannot fail because of me," Thorin said. "Not again, not when we are this close." He looked up. Not at Thranduil at you, the look had everything in it that his face could hold and still be called a face, and then he looked away.

You held his gaze for as long as he would allow it. The understanding settled between you without the need for further words, the long road that could not be abandoned for the sake of one person. Worry sat cold and heavy in your chest at the thought of remaining here—of Thranduil’s measured hospitality and the careful, inescapable walls of the Halls — but you understood. You nodded, once, so that Thorin would see it before he turned away completely.

Balin stepped forward, he walked through the space between the company and you with the particular quality of an old dwarf who had made a decision and was not interested in obstacles, and he stopped in front of you and his face was—Balin's face was doing something you had never seen it do, and had to look away from, and then made yourself look back at.

He opened his arms, you went into them.

He was broad and solid and warm and smelled of pipe smoke and old leather and the specific Balin-smell you'd catalogued from a hundred evenings on the road, and his arms came around you with a careful, complete firmness, and he held you there for a moment next to the throne of the Elvenking with the company behind him and the guards at the edges and Thranduil somewhere above and to the right, and none of that was the most important thing.

You pressed your face against his shoulder and held on.

He pulled back, eventually, with the specific reluctance of someone doing something they've decided to do and wish they hadn't. His hands came to your shoulders, and then to your face—cupping it, the way he'd held your cheek through the bars, the broad warmth of his palms—and he looked at you with an expression that had shed every layer of its professional management and arrived at something very plain underneath.

"You've asked me," he said. "Many times." His voice was quieter than usual.

"What Kiyanê means."

You went still. He held your face in his hands and looked at you and said, "It is a specific word for the child a dwarf." He stopped.

Breathed.

The breath caught slightly, as though the air itself had become difficult. "Not of blood, of choice." He seemed to be listening to his own voice, checking that it was doing what he needed it to do. "It is not—it is not a small word, in our tongue. It has weight. There are—there are obligations to it. Rights on both sides." He paused again, longer this time, and when he continued the words came slower, each one placed with care.

"I have been saying that word since Rivendell," Balin's voice roughened, and he had to stop and steady it before he could continue. "But the truth of it—the truth of it settled in me long before I ever said it aloud."

You couldn't speak. Your throat had produced an objection to speaking and you were inclined, for once, to respect it.

"I want to tell you something," Balin said, and his voice had the quality of something old and deliberate, something chosen and meant, though it wavered on the edges, "and I want you to hold onto it while we are apart." He swallowed. His thumbs moved once against your cheeks, almost absently, as if the contact might steady him. "I have—there are things I ought to have said sooner. But didnt because I am an old fool." A short, rough breath. "It will not—and I will not leave without—" His voice fractured. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathered himself, and tried again. "Without you knowing what you are to me."

He took his hands from your face and reached into the pocket of his coat, and you heard a small sound—the brush of cloth on something, the specific sound of a small, precise object being handled—and then his hands came back, and his fingers found the fall of your hair.

You felt the motion of it—the practiced, unhurried movement of someone who had been braiding for a very long time, who knew the tension of it, who was doing it now with the focused, private attention of something deliberate. A thin strand from the side of your face, drawn back, divided, worked with the patient efficiency of artisan's hands.

"You are—you have been—to me, the first daughter of Balin," he said, while he worked. The words came unevenly now, interrupted by the small pauses of a man fighting to keep them steady. "That fact will be true from this day regardless of where you are, and regardless of where I am, and regardless of what happens between now and when your home with us." His voice was steady in the specific way of someone holding something steady that would rather not be. "You have my name. You have the full rights and standing that come with having that name, in our halls, in Ered Luin and in any hall that recognises our laws."

A pause, a breath that shook once before he mastered it, the braid tightening in the way of someone reaching the end of it. "There is no place in the Lonely Mountain, when we reclaim it, that will be closed to you. There is no decision made by this company that would not consider your interests." He stopped. When he spoke again the words were quieter, almost rough. "And there is no road long enough that I will not come back along it. Do you hear me? No road lass."

He reached into his pocket.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

The bead was small. Smaller than your thumbnail, gold-cased, smooth—you recognised it, in the moment he pressed it onto the end of the braid, with the specific physical shock of recognition. The wood you'd watched him carve, at Beorn's house, by the fire, late at night when he thought you were asleep. The shape that had been a question. The small, turned piece that he'd worked on in the evenings with the little knife, in the amber light, and would never explain.

He'd cased it in gold, perhaps on that the second day at Beorn's, he closed the bead at the end of the braid, the weight of it was the weight of something completed, something that had been in progress since before you'd known it was in progress.

You put your arms around him again, and held on, and felt the broad warmth of his hands come to your back. When he finally drew back it was with the same reluctance as before, only deeper this time, as though each inch of distance cost him something he could not afford to spend.

He did not release you completely. His hands came up once more, cupping your face with a care that bordered on obeisant, and then he pressed his forehead to yours. The contact was firm and deliberate and devastatingly gentle. You felt the slight tremor that ran through him, the effort it took to keep his breathing steady, the way his thumbs moved once across your cheekbones as if memorising the shape of you by touch alone. His eyes were closed. You watched the tight line of his mouth and the faint, betraying shine that gathered at the corners of his lashes and refused to fall.

His forehead remained against yours a moment longer, the shared breath between you carrying the weight of every road they were about to walk without you, and then he straightened, eyes bright and jaw set, and stepped away before the composure he had fought for could crack any further.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

It happened in the particular way of things that have to happen and are happening regardless of what anyone wants—each of them finding you, Balin releasing you into the next arms and the next, the company moving through the goodbye with the compressed, practical thoroughness of dwarves who did not do sentiment by halves but also did not have the time they needed.

Bofur's hug was brief and tight and his hat caught you in the forehead on the way in and he pulled back and said "sorry" and then "you'd better be here when we get back, don't you go running off lass." with a quality of and I mean that that had nothing cheerful in it.

Fíli gripped your arms and looked at you with the earnest, specific attention of a dwarf who was telling you something in the look rather than the words: we will come back. Kíli, behind him, who had clearly decided not to say whatever the first several things he thought of were, put his forehead briefly against yours in a gesture that was too specific to be casual and said nothing.

Dwalin, who said nothing either, put one large hand on your head for one second in the manner of someone placing a blessing, which was the most tender thing you had ever seen Dwalin do and would, you suspected, never be acknowledged by either of you.

Thorin came last, he stopped in front of you with the controlled, careful quality of someone who had been managing this since the condition was announced and was still managing it, and the management was costing him something visible at the edges.

He looked at you.

You looked at him.

He reached out, and his hand came to the braid at the side of your face—fingers touching the bead Balin had placed there, briefly, the way he touched things he was assessing—and then he was still.

"We will reclaim Erebor, " he said. His voice was the voice from Rivendell, from the terrace, from the nights when the management came apart at the seams. "I—we will come back."

"I know," you said. "It's alright—I'll be ok, just, please—be careful."

He looked at you for one more moment. Then he turned and walked toward the doorway of the throne room where the guards had assembled with the provisions, and did not look back, because if he looked back he would not have been able to keep walking.

Balin stopped in the doorway with the guards already moving the company through it and looked back at you from the threshold, and for a moment—one moment, very brief, he had the specific quality of a dwarf who is leaving and who cannot will his feet to move.

Then he went through the door, the throne room was quiet, you stood in the middle of it with the bead at the end of a braid you could feel against your skin, and looked at the empty space where the company had been, and the echo of their footsteps in the carved stone corridors fading in the direction of somewhere you were not going.

You stood in the middle of the floor and breathed, and did not look at whoever else was in the room, and gave yourself exactly the amount of time it took for the sound of the company's footsteps to fully disappear before you let your eyes close.

One breath.

Two.

Bilbo stood in the middle of your room, looking at you with the expression of someone who had anticipated a reaction and had slightly underestimated the scale of it. He was wearing his weskit. His hair was uncharacteristically disheveled. He had the particular quality of a person who had been moving carefully through spaces they shouldn't have been in for a while and was running on the particular compressed energy that produced.

Relief arrived in a delayed rush, the way it always did when the body finished processing survival before the mind had quite caught up, Bilbo was here, solid, breathing and looking faintly put-upon in the dark, the simple fact of it knocked the last of the panic sideways. You closed the distance without deciding to, hands already reaching, and pulled him in.

The hug was too tight by any reasonable measure—arms locked around his shoulders with the particular desperation of someone who had spent the better part of an evening cataloguing every possible way one individual could help thirteen dwarves held captive—for a moment you simply held on, face pressed into the familiar fabric of him, breathing in the proof that he was alright and still stubbornly unbelievably intact.

He made a small, startled sound against your shoulder, the sort of noise that suggested he had not budgeted for being seized quite so thoroughly, but he did not pull away. One of his hands came up to pat your back in that careful, slightly awkward rhythm of his, as if reassuring a particularly emotional piece of furniture. You stayed like that longer than was dignified, the excess pressure of the embrace gradually easing into something less like a vice and more like a confirmation, until the frantic drum of your heart had settled into something almost ordinary again.

"You grabbed my shoulder in the dark," you whispered back, at the volume of someone conducting a furious argument in a public library. "In the middle of the night. While I was asleep."

"I did knock," Bilbo said, with the dignity of a hobbit who felt this was a relevant detail.

"On what, Bilbo? There is no—the door doesn't—it's just a opening."

"I knocked on the wall. Twice."

"Nobody wakes up from someone knocking on a bloody wall!"

"Well, I didn't want to be too loud—"

"So instead you just—grabbed me—"

"I patted," Bilbo said. "It was a pat. A very gentle pat."

You pressed both palms flat against the wall behind you and breathed. The room was dark except for the ambient light from the carved opening and in that light Bilbo looked so unbelievably like himself—solid, real, present, and alive, which was the information you'd come back to eventually regardless of the means of delivery.

"Are you alright?" you said, when your heart had descended to somewhere below your collarbone.

"Perfectly fine," he said, smoothing his palms across his clothing with a confidence that was unusual from Bilbo, who generally distributed his confidence carefully and in specific contexts. "I wanted to check on you."

"You—" You looked at him. At the general quality of a hobbit who had been moving through an Elven fortress undetected and seemed, improbably, entirely unworried about this. "How did you get here?"

"I found a way," Bilbo said, which was its own complete and insufficient sentence.

You looked at him for a moment longer. There was something—not wrong, nothing wrong, but something that sat at the edge of the thing, the quality of him having been through something he wasn't telling you about in full. You were too tired and too disoriented to chase it. You filed it next to the other things you'd been filing.

"I'm alright," you said. "They gave me this room. It's—it's fine. I went to see the others tonight."

Something in his face shifted with relief. "They're well?"

"As well as they can be." You sat down on the edge of the bed. "Kíli complained. Bofur was—Bofur. Balin is—" You stopped yourself. "They're managing."

Bilbo nodded, and the nod had the weight of someone receiving information they'd been needing. "Good," he said. Then, with the particular directness of a hobbit who had made a decision "Be ready after dinner tomorrow. The evening meal—have yourself ready."

You looked at him. "Ready for what?"

"I'm working on something," he said.

"Bilbo—"

"I can't tell you the particulars," he said, with the apologetic but firm manner of someone who had good reasons for what they were doing and couldn't share them and was sorry about that part, but not about the doing. "I just need to know you will be ready."

"Ready to do what, exactly?"

"To move," he said. "Quickly. When the moment comes."

You stared at him. "You're going to get caught"

"I won't," he said and the confidence in those two words was the confidence of something that had a source—not bravado, not false cheer, but something underneath it that was settled and specific. It was the most unsettling thing he'd said, because Bilbo was not typically the sort of person whose confidence came without at least some visible working.

"How are you so sure?" you said.

He looked at you. At something slightly to the left of both of you. "I just am," he said. "You just have to trust me."

You were too tired. You were too tired to pursue it, and the hour was wrong, and the room was dark at the edges, and Bilbo was here and that was the most important data point.

"Just promise you'll be careful," you said.

"Always," he said, which was not accurate and both of you knew it.

He patted your shoulder again—more gently this time, deliberately, the affectionate pat of a hobbit making a point and then he was gone, the corridor swallowing him with the same quiet it had apparently granted him on the way in.

You lay back on the bed. Looked at the ceiling.

After dinner, you thought. Be ready.

The stone hummed faintly and offered no guidance.

The following morning arrived in the particular, unhurried way of mornings inside a mountain—not with the particular quality of daylight, because there was no daylight to offer, but with the incremental shift of activity that constituted the halls of the Woodland Realm waking up, the quality of foot traffic in the corridors changing from the sparse, night-shift movements of elves who kept their own hours to the slightly more populated version that indicated the court had resumed its business.

Neniel arrived with food and quiet courtesy in its habitual place and you ate and thanked her and asked, for the third time, whether there was anything you could take down to the dwarves.

"They are provided for," Neniel said, with the same patient, courteous non-answer she had offered the first two times.

"I know they're provided for," you said. "I just thought—"

"They are provided for," Neniel said, and her tone was still courteous and entirely immovable, and you let it go the way you'd let it go the first two times, and ate your bread, and tucked a roll into the pocket of your dress with the specific unobtrusiveness of someone who had been thinking about this since last night.

The dress was, by this point, a deliberate choice.

Neniel had produced, each morning, a folded set of clothing in the Elvish style—light, well-made, in the greens and silver-blues of Mirkwood's palette. It was beautiful in the understated way that everything produced by elves was beautiful. You had looked at it and thanked Neniel and put it on the chair by the door and continued wearing Radagast's dress, which had seen the goblin tunnels and several weeks of forest and was no longer at its best, but which was yours in a way the other clothing was not.

You had not said this. Neniel had not commented on it. The dress sat on the chair each morning and you put on the other one each morning and this arrangement had continued for three days with the shared, wordless quality of two people who had each understood the situation and decided not to address it directly.

Galion found you in the gardens and garden was an approximate word for the space—a cavernous opening in the deep rock of the Halls, where the stone gave way to an enormous vertical shaft through which the forest above sent down light of a particular, filtered quality, heavy with green by the time it reached the bottom, and water came off the rock face in multiple thin falls that collected in basin pools before draining into the underground river you could hear but not see from the walkway. Moss grew on every surface where the moisture reached, which was most surfaces, and the particular smell of it—cold stone and living green and the sharp, clean smell of moving water—was the most clean and utterly outdoor-feeling thing you'd encountered since Mirkwood's borders.

You had been standing with your hands on the carved railing, looking down at the nearest pool, letting the sound of the water do what water sounds did for the inside of your head, when Galion appeared from the upper walkway.

He was one of Thranduil's court—a steward of some variety, you'd gathered from the dinners and the way other elves deferred to him about organizing practical matters, the specific, authoritative deference of people who understood institutional hierarchy. His manner was pleasant and accomplished it had a quality of direction underneath the pleasantness, the friendliness of someone who had a destination in mind and was being pleasant in service of arriving there.

"You found the Mirrormere falls," he said, which was not the name but was, you assumed, a translation of something. He came to stand beside you at the railing, and the height difference resolved in the familiar way, his shoulder above yours.

"It's beautiful," you said, meaning it.

"It is," Galion agreed. He looked at the falls for a moment with the comfortable familiarity of someone who'd looked at them for centuries. "You are settled, I hope? The room is adequate?"

"Yes," you said. "Thank you."

A pause, of the calibrated variety. "The company you arrived with," Galion said, with the quality of someone picking up a thread they'd left where you could find it, "must be—a relief, to be separated from. After such a journey."

You looked at the falls. You pressed your hands together in front of you—the fidget you had when you were managing something, the small, specific movement of your fingers against each other that meant you were thinking about how to respond.

"They're my friends," you said.

"Of course," Galion said, warmly. "And yet—the Naugrim are a difficult people to travel with. Their customs, their—"

"Could you not call them that?" you said. You kept your voice even. You'd had this conversation, in various forms, for three days now. "There's another word. Dwarves. That one works."

Galion looked at you with the mild, patient expression of someone encountering a preference they found unexpected. "Of course," he said, after a moment. "Dwarves." The word sat differently in his mouth than in yours—not hostile, exactly, but carrying the particular quality of a word being used on loan. "Their purpose—do you know it? In coming through the Woodland Realm?"

Your fingers moved against themselves.

"I know they're trying to get home," you said.

"And the specifics of that journey? The—the particular goal they—"

Galion let the unfinished question hang for a moment, as if giving it room to settle between you, and when he spoke again his voice carried the same unhurried courtesy it always did, the tone of a steward who had all the time in the world and no particular need to raise it.

The filtered light caught the edges of his hair and the embroidery at his collar, his voice had the same pleasant, methodical cadence it always did, as though he were discussing the quality of the moss rather than the business of thirteen captives.

“Home is a long way from here,” he said. “And the road to it, if I understand the direction of their travel correctly, leads through more than forest. The Lonely Mountain has been empty a long time. One wonders what they hope to find there that is worth the risk of the journey.”

You kept your eyes on the nearest fall of water and the way it broke against the stone basin below. Your fingers continued their small, repetitive motion against each other. “I wouldn’t know the particulars,” you said.

“No?” Galion’s tone remained light, almost companionable. “Yet you travel with them. You share their road and their dangers. It would be strange if you had not heard something of their intentions.” He paused, and the pause carried the weight of someone allowing you the courtesy of volunteering the information before he was forced to ask more directly.

"There is the matter of certain jewels that once belonged to the Elvenking. White gems, taken and never returned. Our King Thranduil has not forgotten them. If the company were to recover what lies under the Mountain, one might hope they would see fit to restore what was stolen.”

The word stolen landed with the particular softness of something that had been polished over centuries until it no longer sounded like an accusation. You felt the shift in the air between you—the moment when the pleasant fishing for information began to show its other edge.

Galion’s expression did not change, he remained the same composed, faintly smiling steward who had inquired after your room and the adequacy of it. But the next words came with a familiar undercurrent, the old, automatic contempt that lived just beneath the courtly surface of the elves.

“Of course,” he continued, almost gently, “one cannot expect too much of the Naugrim in matters of honor. They are a grasping people by nature. What they take, they keep. What they dig from the earth, they hoard. It is their way."

The conversation had circled back to the same place it always did, the polite interest, the careful questions, and then the quiet, inevitable slide into the language that treated your friends as a category rather than as people. You had been patient, you had corrected him once already.

"Still—if you were to speak with them, if you were to remind them of the debt that remains unpaid—perhaps they might be persuaded to act against their instincts. For the sake of passage, if nothing else.”

You stopped moving your fingers. The sound of the water filled the space where a reply might have gone and for a moment you simply stood there with the cold stone railing under your hands and the light settling on everything like a second atmosphere. You had answered what little you could. There was nothing left in the exchange that would end any other way than this.

"I'm going to go," you said.

You said it in the same quiet voice you'd used for the whole conversation, without sharpness, without drama, with the specific politeness of someone who had decided they were done and was executing that decision cleanly. You straightened from the railing.

"The falls are wonderful."

And you walked back along the upper walkway with the careful, deliberate pace of a person not demonstrating how much they wanted to walk faster.

Thranduil was in the corridor, not waiting—he wasn't in the posture of someone waiting, he was in the posture of someone going somewhere and happening to be in this corridor on the way, which produced the encounter with the quality of coincidence that you had, by this point in your acquaintance with the Elvenking, begun to suspect was a category he used more deliberately than it appeared.

You stopped, he looked at you with the composed, measuring attention that was his default expression, the one that gave you nothing and took in everything. "You are avoiding Galion," he said.

"I finished our conversation," you said.

"Mm," he said, which in Thranduil's register appeared to mean something entirely different from Balin's mm—less warmth, more filing cabinet. He turned and walked on, which was an invitation if you read it correctly, and you fell into step beside him the way you had at the dinner.

He walked through the corridors with the unhurried proprietorial ease of someone in their own home who had stopped noticing the architecture, and you walked beside him and watched the carvings go past and thought about what Bilbo had said—after dinner, be ready—and turned this over in the back of your mind while the front of your mind managed the conversation.

"That wine," you said.

He looked at you sideways, very briefly, with the quality of a man accessing a memory he had found interesting. "What of it."

"Was it really two thousand years old?"

He was quiet for one corridor-length, during which you passed through a carved arch and turned left along a passage you hadn't walked before. "Come."

The library occupied a section of the halls you hadn't found—carved deeper into the rock than the guest quarters, the ceilings lower here, more intimate, the alcoves lit with the amber of enclosed lanterns rather than the ambient brightness of the passages. Shelves of carved stone itself held scrolls in their thousands—not books as you'd understood them, but rolled parchment and what appeared to be older materials, stored with the care of things that had been here a very long time.

Thranduil moved through it with the ease of a elf moving through a room that had been his for centuries, and indicated, with a precise gesture, a section of shelving where the scrolls had a different quality—older, the cases around them more elaborate, the material visible at the scroll ends slightly different in texture.

"The Second Age," he said. "Those records were set down when the wine was young."

You looked at the scrolls. At the cases. At the weight of time implied in the specific care with which everything was housed. "So it wasn't foul," you said, after a moment.

A pause of one full second.

"It was not," he said, with the specific, contained quality of a man addressing this particular point with everything he had available in terms of restraint.

"I really don't like red wine," you said, which was an explanation rather than an apology, and he looked at you for a moment with the expression of a man reassessing the taxonomy of the situation.

"You may make use of the library," he said, moving on. "If you choose. The scrolls in the common tongue are in the western alcoves."

"Thank you," you said. You looked at the rows and rows of records and felt, beneath everything else, the specific, genuine pull of a person who liked reading being presented with a very great deal of it. "Is—is some of this about the dwarves? About Erebor?"

"Some," he said, which was not an invitation to pursue it and was not not one either.

"So," you began almost casualy as your eyes browsed the shelves. "was that was your oldest wine?"

He had begun to turn away, and he stopped, and turned back with the patient, faintly exasperated expression of a man who had been waiting for you to get back to this.

"No," he said. "It was not."

He looked at you. At the scrolls, at something over your shoulder that was probably a thought and not a thing. "I have things that were bottled before the construction of Barad-dûr," he said, "You would not want to try those either, I suspect."

"Probably not," you agreed.

The very slight quality at the corner of his mouth twitched. He turned and walked back toward the passage.

You stood in the library and breathed, and waited until you were certain he was gone, and then sat down in the western alcoves with a scroll about the geography of Rhûn and tried to read it and mostly succeeded.

The bread rolls had been accumulating, three dinners worth—taken from the table with the calm focus of someone exercising a skill they'd been developing—wrapped in a cloth and stored in the coolest corner of the room assigned to you. You'd added to them whatever else seemed portable and unlikely to be missed, two small pastries from the day before yesterday, a handful of nuts from the afternoon refreshments Neniel had brought, a piece of something dense and honeyed that you suspected was the Elvish equivalent of a protein bar.

You assembled all of this after the evening meal, while Neniel was occupied elsewhere, wrapped it carefully in a cloth, and settled it agasint your good shoulder—which required some redistribution of the cloth and contents.

You waited for the corridor to go quiet before slipping out.

The cells were familiar now in the specific way that repeated navigation makes a route familiar—the turn at the second arch, the change in the light to dimmer amber tones, the texture of the floor where the stone had worn differently, the point at which you could hear voices before you could see bars.

You heard Kíli first, which was always how it was.

"—that is not how you say it—"

"It's how Bofur taught me—"

"Well Bofur has been teaching it wrong for forty years, that's not a credential—"

The distribution of rolls took some time and produced more enthusiasm than the quantity warranted, because the Elven provisions were adequate in the way that things calculated to sustain life without offering comfort were adequate, and bread from the dinner table that had been carried by someone who'd come specifically to bring it tasted different from bread that arrived with the institutional routine need of it.

You gave Bombur two without explanation, and he received them with the solemn, genuine appreciation of a dwarf who recognised that the giver had understood something important.

Balin took his with the particular look of a man who wanted to say several things and was selecting thank you, lass as the appropriate representative of all of them.

Thorin's cell was the last he was standing when you arrived—he was always standing, you'd decided this was simply how Thorin Oakenshield occupied his captivity, the same way he occupied everything, with the specific stubborn uprightness of a dwarf who was not going to be diminished by circumstances. He looked at you and then at bun in your hands.

"You've been saving those," he said.

"Only for a couple of days," you said. "There still fresh, I think."

He took the roll through the bars with the deliberate, unhurried care of someone who was not going to demonstrate how much they wanted it, and ate it with the same quality. You sat down on the stone floor in front of his cell, sideways, your shoulder against the bars, your legs stretched out in front of you.

"Tell me about Erebor," you asked.

He looked down at you. At the position you'd taken. At the particular quality of the request, which you both knew had become its own specific thing over the months of the journey—not an empty tell me something, but the request for the particular quality of Thorin's voice when he talked about the mountain without managing it, the version that went somewhere else and came back different.

He sat down on the stone floor of his cell. This was notable, because Thorin sitting on the floor of his cell was not something you'd seen before, but he did it with the decisive, unselfconscious movement of someone making a choice and committing to it.

He told you about the Gate, not the Front Gate from a strategic standpoint—not the measurements and the fortifications and the defensive considerations—but the experience of it. The sound it made when it opened, which he'd heard as a child, which was a sound that came up through the stone beneath your feet before it arrived through the air, a sound that was felt before it was heard. The scale of the arch above it, which was visible from a mile away at the approach, growing as you came closer, the mountain's face becoming more specific, more itself, the further in you traveled.

He was talking about the fires in the lower forges—the particular quality of the heat from them, the way it stratified in the deep halls, cooler near the floor and the specific quality that heat had when it came off stone that had been heated for centuries rather than hours—when the conversation lulled and something else began.

Bofur started it, soft and low, almost under his breath, as though the it had simply been waiting for the right shape of conversation to emerge into. The tune of it—the particular, old, measured tune of the dwarves, it sounded like one that had already been old when the mountain was young.

The words went up and down with the gravity of old things being remembered.

"Far over the Misty Mountains cold, to dungeons deep and caverns old—"

One by one the others joined it, quietly, the way dwarves joined things—without ceremony, without announcement, each voice finding its place in the shape of the sound the way stones fit into the wall they'd been cut for. Balin's voice, deep and measured. Dwalin's, lower still, the rumble of it felt in your chest despite the lack of volume. Glóin and Óin in rough harmony. Bombur, who had a better voice than anyone outside the company knew, adding a layer underneath that the others rested on.

"We must away, ere break of day, to claim our long-forgotten gold—"

You closed your eyes, the stone floor was cold through the fabric of your dress. The bars of the cell were solid against your shoulder. The amber torchlight was warm on your eyelids. And the song came through all of it—through the stone and the bars and the walls of the Halls of the Woodland Realm—with the quality of something that had been sung in worse places and was not going to be diminished by this one.

Thorin was singing, you picked his voice in the song—the specific timbre of it, the way it carried differently from the others, the weight it brought to the words that was not about volume. He was singing and you were listening with your eyes closed and your head against the bars, and the song had the quality it always had, the quality of something that was both a lament and a statement of intent simultaneously, grief and stubbornness woven together so thoroughly they'd become one single indistinguishable material.

Thorin was looking at you, he had been looking at you since you'd closed your eyes, with the expression he had in the dark and at night and in the specific moments when the management of what he felt and the feeling itself came apart slightly at the seams. You were less than a meter from him, your head against the bars, your eyes closed, the line of your face in the amber light and he was looking at you the way he looked when he talked about Erebor, with the specific quality of someone in proximity to something they wanted with more of themselves than they had organised language for.

His hand moved slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone moving through something difficult, his hand crossed the stone floor of his cell toward the bars. His fingers came to the edge of the bar nearest you, and then past it, through the gap, hovering above the floor outside—the floor where your hand rested, flat on the stone, close enough that the gap between his fingers and yours was the width of a thought.

He did not close the gap, he was building to closing the gap, which was different, and the distinction mattered, and the song went on around him while he sat with his fingers above yours and looked at your closed eyes and the particular peace of your expression while you listened.

"The pines were roaring on the height, the winds were moaning in the night—"

The song stopped, it stopped in the way things stopped when something interrupted them from outside—not a natural ending, not a fading, but a sudden cessation, voices cutting off in sequence, the silence arriving with the specific quality of something that had been imposed.

You opened your eyes, that silence had a direction. You followed it upward, and turned, twisting to look behind you and above, and found Thranduil.

He was standing on the upper step above you— separated by only three feet of space, and he was looking down at the cells and at you and at the general arrangement of the scene with an expression that had layers you couldn't immediately read and were not, in this moment, positioned to examine carefully. His presence alone had been enough to cut the song off mid-breath, the air still held the shape of the interrupted melody, and under it the denser quiet of two wills meeting across stone and iron.

His arm was extended, palm up. A similar gesture as that first dinner, the same offered arm, but his eyes were not on you.

His eyes were on Thorin, the two of them looked at each other through the bars and across the distance with the specific quality of two people conducting a conversation without any words in it, and none of the words were warm. Thranduil’s gaze was cool and assessing and carried the weight of someone who had already decided the measure of the man below him and found it wanting, Thorin’s answering stare was banked heat, the controlled fury of a king who had been interrupted in something private and would not give the interrupter the satisfaction of seeing him flinch.

The air between them tightened. For a long moment neither moved, and the silence took on the charged, metallic quality of a drawn blade held just short of contact.

You felt the shift before you saw it—the subtle adjustment of Thranduil’s attention, the way his focus slid from Thorin to you with the deliberate precision of someone choosing where to place the next pressure. His extended hand remained steady, palm open, the invitation unchanged. He did not speak. He simply waited, and the waiting itself became another form of command.

You did not want to make it worse for the dwarves in the cells, the choice was deliberate and reluctant in equal measure—a calculated yielding made for the sake of the dwarves still watching from the cells, because any visible resistance would only harden the moment and may leave them to bear the cost of it. So you relented. You lifted your hand and set it into his open palm.

The contact was barely complete when a voice cut across it—Kíli’s, sharp with protest.

“Hey don—”

Thranduil’s eyes snapped to him with a precision that was almost physical. The look carried no raised voice, no gesture, only the absolute and instantaneous weight of the Elvenking who had decided the interruption was finished before it had the chance to begin.

Kíli’s mouth closed mid-breath. The silence that followed was denser than the one the song had left behind.

Only then did Thranduil’s fingers close around yours. He drew you to your feet with a single smooth pull that left no room for second thoughts. The motion was elegant and inescapable, the strength in it carefully measured so that it never quite became force, and yet you were standing, hand in his, before the full weight of the decision had settled. Below you, Thorin’s expression flickered—something raw and quickly shuttered—as the contact between you and the Elvenking was made visible and irreversible

You looked at Thorin, who had withdrawn to his side of the bars with the smooth, expressionless movement of something being managed back into place, and then at Thranduil’s face, which had shifted back to a composed, unreadable surface.

He kept your hand on his arm.

The walk was silent. Not the silence of someone who had nothing to say, but the silence of someone who had quite a lot to say and was deciding the architecture of it. You walked with your hand on Thranduil's arm through the passages of the Halls, past the carved arches and the ambient stone-light, up the levels, back through the geography you'd made your own over the last few days, until the doorway of your room appeared and Thranduil stopped.

He turned to face you, in the light of the passage his expression was its composed, measuring self, but there was a quality underneath the composure that had not been present before—a tightness, something that was either anger or something adjacent to anger, managed so thoroughly that only the edge of it was visible.

"You will tell me," he said, "what you know of the dwarves' intentions."

His voice was quiet. Not soft—quiet in the way that very controlled things were quiet, the absence of volume as a choice rather than a limitation. "Their purpose here. The secrets they chose to carry into these halls."

You looked at him. "I can't do that," you said.

"You can," he said.

"I can not do that—"

"You can you simply choose not to." He announced looking down at you.

"—I can NOT because there is NOTHING TO TELL."

He held your gaze for a moment that had weight and direction. The quality of his anger—because that was what it was, below the composure, below the sardonic surface and the cool intelligence, something that had been heated by the scene in the cells and was running hotter than his face was showing—pressed against the managed surface of him, a management running parallel to your lapse of composure.

"You shall remain here" he said, "until you do."

He walked away before you could respond, which was, you'd come to understand, the Thranduil equivalent of closing a door.

You stood in the doorway of your room and looked at the corridor where he'd been and thought about the dwarves on the other side of the bars, and about Bilbo's after dinner, be ready, and about the song that had stopped before it ended.

You sat on the bed and did not sleep, the ceiling mocked you with it's faint hum and the hours went past in the way hours went in halls without windows, which was indistinguishably from each other.

Bilbo did not come.

You watched the door until the ambient light in the carved opening did something that might have been the deepest hour of the night, and then watched it some more, the corridor beyond it stayed empty, and you thought about all the reasons a hobbit might not have come, and tried to select the ones that were benign, and found you couldn't hold the selection steady.

He said he wouldn't get caught, you thought. He was so sure.

What if something happened anyway?

"It's fine," you said, through your teeth, which was approximately fifty percent accurate. "What are you using? The herb?"

"Athelas, in part," she said. "Mixed with calathiel root and rendered oils. The smell is mostly the root." She pressed the edges of the poultice down with two fingers, gentle despite the precision of the pressure. "It will reduce the swelling by morning."

"Oh," you said. "Thank you."

She moved to prepare a second application and you sat on the edge of the bed—which was, in the involuntary accounting your mind kept doing of its surroundings, an extremely good bed, high and wide, covered in something that was neither wool nor linen but had the best qualities of both—you looked at the room.

It was beautiful. Everything in Thranduil's halls was beautiful, in the same ambient, overwhelming way that everything in Rivendell had been beautiful, though differently—Rivendell's beauty had been warm, the beauty of a place that held light and released it, this was more structural, the beauty of something carved rather than grown, the stone itself doing the work rather than the things set against it. The walls were the continuation of the exterior carvings, intricate and continuous, no surface left without intention. The window—which opened onto a view of the hall's interior rather than any outside, because there was no outside from in here, only more of the vast stone interior and the light playing off it—was framed in a carving of intertwined branches that met at the top in something that might have been stars or might have been flowers but was, somehow both and neither.

You looked at all of it and thought about the company in a cell somewhere below you and stopped looking at any of it.

"You live here ?" you asked, partly to have something to say.

She glanced at you briefly. Her face was the standard elvish construction—the impossible bone structure, the composed attention, the particular quality of elvish eyes that was difficult to look at directly for reasons you hadn't yet successfully articulated. She was tall, they were all tall, but this elf carried her height differently from the guards—less weaponised, more simply inhabited, the easy unthinking verticality of someone who had never had cause to consider the space they occupied in a room. Her hair was the particular deep copper-brown of autumn beech leaves. Younger-seeming than some, though what that meant here you couldn't even begin to calculate.

"I serve the Elvenking," she said with a small smile, which was not quite a confirmation and not quite a deflection.

"What's your name?"

Another brief glance, slightly more considered this time. "Neniel," she said, and the name had the quality of something offered rather than volunteered—a decision to give it rather than a reflex.

She received your name in turn with a small nod that indicated she already knew it, which you found simultaneously unsurprising and mildly unsettling, and moved on.

"The Elvenking has also provided clothing," Neniel said. She moved to the wardrobe at the far wall—carved stone, like everything else and opened it to reveal several garments of the particular quality that seemed to be the default Elvish standard, the fabrics with a weight and drape that made your dress look like what it was, something you'd been wearing for several months through forests, mountains and goblin tunnels. "You may wish to change for dinner," she said, and it was not a question.

You looked at the clothing. Then at your dress—the green fabric Radagast had given you, worn soft at the elbows and hem by this point, the embroidery a little frayed, the belt worn to a particular curve that had conformed to you specifically over time.

"I'm alright," you said. "Thank you, though."

Neniel turned from the wardrobe with the expression of someone receiving information that didn't fit their operational parameters and was deciding what to do with it. She looked at your dress. Then at you. Her face performed the elvish version of a reaction—controlled, composed the barest fraction of a movement at the outer edge of her expression that would have been telling on anyone less trained.

"Dinner is usually formal," she said, which was as close to are you certain as she was apparently going to offer.

"I know," you said. "I'm fine in this, thank you."

She held the moment for a breath. Then closed the wardrobe with the contained, precise motion of someone filing a thing away. "As you wish" she said, and went back to the poultice.

When Neniel left you had, according to no clock you could consult, somewhere between an hour and an eternity before dinner, the particular quality of light inside the stone halls of the Woodland Realm made time feel like a suggestion rather than a system. The room was warm, the bed behind you was most likely going to to be the best thing you'd slept near in months, and you paced the length of it and back and did not sit down.

Right, you thought. Right. Okay. Think. Just think.

The dwarves were in cells. This was a central fact, cells were in the lower levels, which you'd been walking toward when the direction changed, which meant they were accessible from the main walkways, which you'd seen, which was—well there was the large one near the second carved pillar from the left—

You don't know the layout, you don't know the guards' rotations.

You don't have your oil you, you don't have anything. You turned at the wall and paced back.

What would Thorin do. He'd assess and plan—he wouldn't panic. He'd be furious, he IS furious, but he'd compress it and plan around it. What would Balin do. Balin would try to negotiate, or find the leverage point, or—

Who are you kidding you don't have any leverage.

What would Kíli do. You paused, Kíli would try to find the cells himself. Which was—not objectively worse than any other option and was at least a plan with a direction—

What would Gandalf do.

You stopped pacing.

Gandalf wasn't here. Gandalf had magic and a staff from which the magic came from, if not directly from his person, which was Gandalf's default state, and either way you were not Gandalf and did not have access to whatever Gandalf had and needed to operate with what you had.

What you had was a room, a dinner invitation. A named elf—Neniel—and the fact that she'd been most likely assigned to you, which meant she'd be nearby. The halls themselves, which were vast, architecturally complex and which you'd had only one walk through, not enough to navigate confidently but enough to establish that the walkways went down as well as up. You were still pacing when Neniel returned.

The walk to dinner was through corridors that curved and connected in ways your internal compass couldn't quite follow, you walked with your hands clasped in front of you and your eyes mostly down, which was less deference than strategy. The floor told you things the walls didn't—whether you were going up or down, whether the stone changed quality in ways that might indicate a structural boundary, whether the foot traffic had worn paths in the stone that suggested frequency of use. You were cataloguing without knowing quite what you'd do with the catalogue.

A passage to the left, wider than the one you were in, with a quality of light at its far end that was different—cooler, less ambient, the light of a space with more air in it. A walkway going down, its entrance framed in a narrower arch than the main stairs, the stone of it a slightly different colour. A guard post, two elves, at a junction you passed through without raising your eyes.

Down, you noted, past the junction, potentially left.

Neniel did not speak during the walk, which you were grateful for and also slightly bereft by, because silence gave your thoughts too much room. You watched the floor and the edges of passages and the quality of light at every turning.

The dinning hall announced itself before you saw it—sound first, the layered acoustic of a large space containing more conversation than any single corridor would account for, a quality of noise that had drink and ease in it in equal measure, the specific social ambience of people who were comfortable in their surroundings.

Then the room itself, it was not as vast as the throne room had been, but it had the same architectural grammar—pillars from living rock, carved surfaces, the vault of stone above carrying sound rather than swallowing it, the light warm enough in here to read by with golden lamplight supplementing it. A long table ran the centre, set with a precision that made Elrond's dinner look provisional by comparison, every element placed with an attention to symmetry that bordered on mathematical. Food in quantities that were startling even after months of Bombur's generous portions—not the careless abundance of a host who overestimates, but the deliberate abundance of someone demonstrating that they can, which was a different thing entirely.

Elves, everywhere was elves—standing in conversational groups near the pillars, some already seated along the table's length, moving between with the particular fluid ease of people who had been doing this for centuries and had found the rhythm of it long ago. The quality of the conversation was different from anything you'd sat in since arriving in this world—not louder or quieter but with a different texture, the particular social register of people performing their role in a court, which was its own language alongside whatever they were actually saying.

At the head, Thranduil's chair was not quite a replica of his throne. Smaller, without a enormous antlered arc behind it, sat at the head of the table with the composed, inevitable authority of something that was the obvious centre of the room whether or not it was the tallest piece of furniture in it. A crown of branches—sat atop silver-pale hair with the unhurried certainty of something that had always been there.

Thranduil was already seated when you came in, speaking to the elf at his right in the low, measured tone of someone having a secondary conversation while monitoring the primary one, which was the room. He did not look at you when you entered, or not obviously. He looked at a point that was not quite where you were and then moved on, which was possibly less worrisome than being looked at.

The Elves that filled the space—were not guards or soldiers, but another category entirely, the particular Elvish version of courtiers or administrators or guests, dressed in the greens, silvers and deep golds of Mirkwood's court, the quality of their clothing and their bearing communicating a hierarchy that your eye could read without being able to name its ranks.

Neniel led you to a seat at the table's middle section, not elevated, not specifically distinguished—simply a seat among other seats, the elves on either side of it already engaged with each other. She indicated it with a slight gesture and withdrew to some position you immediately lost track of, you sat down in the seat and looked at the table and the food and drink and the assembled court of Thranduil the Elvenking and breathed very carefully through your nose.

For Balin, you thought. Thorin. Kíli. Bofur. Just get through this—for them.

Then you put on the expression of someone who was perfectly fine and looked up, and met the nearest pair of elvish eyes.

The questions started within minutes of the food. Not hostile—this was important to establish, because the questions themselves were asked with the composed, curious courtesy of beings who considered themselves the civilised party in any interaction and wanted you to know they were treating you well. The fascination was genuine, you were interesting to them in the way a rare specimen might be interesting—not cruelly, but with the particular, clinical warmth of people who had catalogued most things and found themselves with something they considered uncatalogued.

"I hear tale that you traveled with the Naugrim," said the elf to your left. Male, dark-haired, with the specific quality of someone who held a position in this court that they considered important. He said Naugrim the way people said words they didn't consider offensive because they'd always used them, with a casual authority that put the hair up on the back of your neck. "Voluntarily?"

You knew enough, by now. You'd heard that word once in Rivendell and now from these Mirkwood elves twice on the march and both times the temperature around the dwarves had changed at the sound of it, the company's posture tightening in the way that postures tightened around words that had done damage before. You knew what the tone meant even without the translation.

"With dwarves yes, the company of Thorin Oakenshield to be precise," you said, keeping your voice even. "Yes. Voluntarily."

"And you—came upon them? During your travels?" The elf had the specific, careful interest of someone mining a vein they'd found promising. "Or you knew them before?"

"I joined the company some months ago," you said, which was accurate and deeply insufficient and he didn't have the context to know the difference, so you left it there.

"For what purpose?" said the elf to your right—female, lighter-haired, her eyes carrying the specific, pleasant curiosity of someone who had asked a question they expected to find an interesting answer to.

"I was—traveling in the same direction," you said, which was approximately as accurate as anything else you might have offered in answer.

"Where are you from?" said the first elf. "Your people—where do they dwell?"

"Far away," you said.

"Farther than the Misty Mountains?"

"Yes."

"Further even than Rhûn?"

"I don't—" You stopped yourself. "Yes. Further than that." The geography still defeated you at the edges, names that had no map attached to them in your mind, but you'd learned that far and further east generally indicated distance that bought you and the company both out and away from follow-up questions.

The food in front of you was—genuinely extraordinary food, the elvish craft applied to cooking the way it was applied to everything else, each element precise and considered and flavored in ways that your mouth identified as good before your brain had finished processing what it was. You ate in the careful, measured portions you'd developed since Radagast's, which you were now aware looked distinctive at an elvish table where everyone else ate in a different way, but the alternative was making yourself conspicuous by speeding up, and you'd rather be the person who ate like a guest than the person who tried to eat like a local and got it wrong.

A server came with a gilded pitcher, you'd been watching for this, in the way you watched for things you knew were coming in situations where you didn't entirely feel like yourself. Deep red spilled into the stemmed glass in front of you, with a quality of color that suggested considerable age and intoxicant. You opened your mouth to ask what it was but the server was already moving on with the smooth efficiency of someone who had a table of quantity to attend to and could not slow for individual inquiries.

You looked at it, you looked at the elves on either side of you, both of whom were drinking with the easy appreciation of people who found this unremarkable, you took a mouthful.

The first thing was the tannins—the deep, drying quality of a very old red wine, the kind of wine that tasted less like fruit than like the concept of time, a complexity so layered it went several directions at once and none of them were directions you particularly wanted your palate to travel.

Your cheeks filled, as you realized you mistake, you sat at the most regal table you'd ever sat at with wine in your mouth and your cheeks puffed out like a displeased chipmunk and conducted a very rapid internal negotiation about your options, which were to say the least—limited.

You could spit it back into the cup, which was not happening. You could spit it onto the floor, which was most definitely not happening. You could swallow it, which your body was expressing opinions about, or you could sit here until something else presented itself, which was not a long-term strategy.

You swallowed, the gag was reflexive and brief and you pressed the cloth from your lap to your mouth immediately, but it had been witnessed by at least the elf to your right, who turned with the politely concerned expression of someone noting an anomaly.

"Is it not to your taste?" He said. "It is a Dorwinion vintage. Over two thousand years old."

You lowered the cloth. You were still patting your mouth. You looked at the wine in the cup, you looked at the elf.

"Well that explains it," You said, with the complete, earnest sincerity of someone who had arrived at a conclusion and was sharing it without guile "It must have gone foul."

A silence settled over the immediate area of the table.

The elf to your right stared at you with the expression of a person whose understanding of the situation had just encountered an obstacle they had not anticipated, the elf to your left had gone very still.

The elf to your right said, carefully "Dorwinion wine does not—it is considered among the finest in—"

"Right, no, absolutely," you said, because you were beginning to understand from their expression what you'd said. "It's—it's very—I'm sure it's excellent, I just don't—" You looked at the cup. "I'm not really a wine person."

The elf considered this information. "You do not drink wine?"

"No—not really. Not red wine. I'm more of a—I don't—" You set the cloth down. "I'm sure it's lovely if you like wine," you said, firmly, and applied yourself to your food and did not look up for a considerable length of time.

From the far end of the room, you did not see the expression that crossed Thranduil's face in the moment following your statement. You did not see the particular quality of the pause it produced in him—the small, arrested stillness of a elf who has just heard something that has landed in a register he had not prepared for, who is looking at you with the composed, attentive expression of someone depositing a lemon into their mouth while taking great care not to show the effect of said lemon on one's face. You did not see any of this, because you were too busy patting your mouth with a cloth and looking at the cup with the mild, regretful expression of someone who had tried something and found it not what they'd hoped.

What you did register, peripherally and somewhat belatedly, was that the section of the table nearest you had gone fractionally quieter.

You picked up the cup of water that had been placed beside the wine and drank some of it, which helped considerably, and went back to eating.

The elves' fascination continued through the courses with the persistence of people who had found a topic of genuine interest and saw no reason to leave it before it was exhausted.

"The Naugrim can be—difficult companions," said the elf to your left, with the tone of someone offering a diplomatic assessment of a well-established fact. "You found their company adequate for a journey of this duration?"

"I found their company excellent," you said.

"Ah," she said, with the particular inflection that communicated how charming that you think so.

"They kept me alive on several occasions," you said, which was both true and slightly more pointed than your usual register, and the elf received it with the composed, gentle tolerance of someone who had decided you didn't know enough to have strong opinions and was finding your strong opinions endearing.

"Indeed," said the elf to your right. "It must be a relief to find yourself back among—more—civilized company at last."

Civilized, you thought, and let it sit in your chest, and pressed it down.

"They are very capable," said another elf, from across the table—you hadn't noticed him join the conversation, but elvish conversations had a way of expanding without announcement. "For Naugrim. Though their manners—" He made a gesture with one hand that communicated volumes without being specific enough to argue with.

"Their manners," you said, "are exactly what they need to be."

The elf looked at you with the patient amusement of someone who found your loyalty disproportionate and sweet. "You are generous," he said.

You ate another bite. You answered another question with the same insufficient accuracy you'd been managing all evening. You agreed, carefully, that the stone halls of the Woodland Realm were indeed very fine. You accepted another cup of something—water this time, having turned the wine cup face-down with a decisiveness that had produced another brief silence and which you were not going to revisit.

The elf to your left was describing, with the particular quality of someone telling you something for your benefit, how the dwarves had brought their troubles upon themselves, how it was a mercy really that you had been—here the elf paused and selected a word with the care of someone choosing between several that all meant the same thing—liberated, from the company.

Liberated—Liberated ?

You pressed your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

Balin was somewhere in the lower halls, proably in the dark, and knowing Balin he was most likely looking after the others the way Balin looked after everything—quietly, thoroughly, without making it about himself. Kíli was probably talking too much, which he did when he was convincing both the company and himself that he was not frightened.

Ori was probably holding up less well than he wanted to and Bofur was probably doing the specific, warm, reliable thing Bofur did when others were struggling, which was to make himself cheerful enough for two without making it look effortful.

Thorin was—Thorin was potentially stewing somewhere, you imagined that his expression was likely the expression he had when he was managing something enormous and not showing it, and he was fine, because Thorin was always fine, because Thorin had to be fine, you refused to let your mind accept any alternative.

Abanjabl, you thought, and then thought it again more deliberately, the word Kíli had taught you only weeks into the journey sitting bright and ready in the specific part of your brain that handled things you were saving for appropriate deployment.

You looked at the elf across the table with your best attempt at a guileless expression and said, very carefully, "Abanjabl."

The elf blinked. "Pardon me?"

"Oh It's—" you started, in the voice of someone about to explain something you hadnt realized had been heard "it's a term of—it's a Khuzdul expression. For—admiration. Of your perspective." You held your expression together with both hands, metaphorically.

The elf looked uncertain. The elf to your left also looked uncertain. Several elves in the immediate vicinity of uncertain had become slightly uncertain by proximity.

Then from the head of the table, the sound of a chair. Measured, unhurried.

Thranduil stood.

He had, from everything you'd observed, the specific quality of someone who could stand up from a table and produce the same effect as other people standing on a table, without any visible effort. He didn't look at you immediately. He looked at his wine, set it down, and then looked at the room in the way the room was witnessed when the person it belonged to turned their attention to it.

Then he came around the end of the table toward you, his expression was composed to a degree that was itself informative, in the way that a perfectly still lake is informative about what's underneath it. He stopped beside your chair and extended one arm, the gesture of someone offering to walk someone somewhere, the elbow crooked with the particular precision of a Elf who knew exactly what he was doing.

You looked at his arm for a long while before you gained enough courage to meet his gaze.

His eyebrow moved. Just one, slightly, the fraction of a millimeter that constituted, apparently, the full Thranduil version of—well? Go on then. Refuse me.

You put your hand through his arm, he walked you out.

The corridor outside the dinning hall was not silent, but it had a different quality of sound—the dinner's conversation muffled by the carved stone walls, the light steady and cool, the long hall stretching ahead with the composed, patient quality that Thranduil's halls had in every direction.

He walked at a pace that was neither fast or slow, calibrated to something internal. You were aware of the height difference the way you were always aware of height differences with elves—the particular geometry of having your hand through the arm of someone who was above your eyeline, the slight adjustment of pace required, the general sense of the world having a different horizon from his angle.

He said nothing and said nothing in return.

The corridor turned, and another opened on the right, and you walked through the second junction with the quiet continuity of two people who had arrived at a temporary arrangement and were seeing it through without discussion.

At the doorway of your room—which he found without hesitation, without asking, which told you he knew exactly where you'd been put—he stopped. Withdrew his arm with the contained grace of someone completing a gesture. Looked at the door. Then at you, briefly, with the composed, lateral expression that was apparently his default setting for most interactions.

"The elf you were speaking to," he said. "Carandir." A pause, and in the pause his expression did something—the smallest possible compression at the outer corner of his eyes, the ghost of an expression that did not quite surface.

"He has held the same two opinions about the Naugrim for over five hundred years and has never thought it necessary to have a third." Another pause. "I too find him—considerably dull."

You looked at him.

He looked back at you with the particular composure of someone who has said exactly what they intended to say and is waiting for the other party to catch up.

"You understand Khuzdul?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smirk. The shape of one, geometric and brief, the structural outline of the thing without committing to it.

"Sleep well" Thranduil said as he turned and walked back down the corridor at the same measured pace, rounded the turning and was gone.

You stood at the doorway of your room for a moment. Then went inside, sat on the edge of the bed and said several things quietly into the empty room that you would not have admitted you'd said in any company.

Later—the quality of light through the interior window had gone darker, the ambient glow of the stone settling into its night register, the sounds of the hall quieting to the particular acoustic of a large space with most of its people asleep—you sat on the bed and went through the plan again.

The staircase to the cells, past the junction, left, the narrow arch. Two guards at the junction. The guards had changed during the walk back from dinner—you'd noted it a different pair, which meant rotations were happening, which meant there was a pattern, which meant there were gaps in it if you knew when they occurred.

Shit, you didn't know when they occurred. Go anyway, you thought, you can be careful, you can't do anything about anything from inside this room.

You waited until the light had been at its darkest register for what felt like a long time. Then you got up, went to the doorway and peered out of it it very carefully.

The corridor was empty, you went left, the halls at night were different from the halls in any other condition—not frightening, exactly, but with a quality that was difficult to name, the carved surfaces doing something different in the dark-register of light, the carvings moving in ways that couldn't be movement because they were stone, the specific trick of the ambient glow on the intricately textured surfaces. You moved quickly and quietly and kept your shoulders in and your footsteps on the sides of your feet, the particular soft-shoe technique of someone who had learned, over months of camps and watches, how to move through quiet spaces without announcing themselves.

The junction came. You stopped at the edge of it and listened for a long time before you looked around the corner.

Two elves. Different pair from before—you'd expected that, or rather hoped for it. They were speaking in low Elvish, their attention directed at each other in the specific, comfortable way of people mid-conversation on a quiet watch.

You waited, they finished the conversation. One of them moved—going right, away from the junction, toward a passage you hadn't mapped. The other turned to look at something further down the left passage, their back to the junction, before following the after the first.

You went through, there was a narrow arch and the staircase behind it went down into a quality of light that was cooler than the hall above, the stone here less decorated, more structural—the working parts of the fortress rather than the displayed parts, functional and plainer. You descended with one hand on the wall and your feet careful on each step, counting, the count giving your mind something to do besides calculate everything that could go wrong.

Two levels down, the passage opened into a longer looping corridor, and the corridor had doors.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

"Psst." The sound came from somewhere to your right, quiet and immediate, you turned toward it.

Kíli was at the bars of his cell with his hands wrapped around them and his expression cycling rapidly through startled, relieved and alarmed, in that order. He opened his mouth.

"Ssshh." you whispered, which was slightly hypocritical given that you'd come to down to check on them.

"You're here," he whispered back, with the emphasis of someone for whom this was a significant piece of information. His eyes moved over you quickly, the way the company's eyes moved over each other after difficult things. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," you said, and crouched at the bars so you were at his level. "Are you alright? Is everyone—"

"I'm fine, Fíli's fine, Ori's—" He glanced down the corridor. "—managing, Bombur's asleep. Dori is being very Dori about the whole thing."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he's built a system for organizing the cell that I think he finds calming." Kíli's expression conveyed his feelings about this without words. "The others are further down. You should—" He glanced at the corridor again. "The guard comes back on the quarter hour. You shouldn't be here long."

"I know," you said. "I just needed to—"

"I know," Kíli said, and his voice had dropped the levity, just for a moment, the face underneath it younger than usual. "Go check on them. Come back if you can."

You squeezed his hand through the bars and moved on.

Bofur was awake—you'd have been surprised if he wasn't. He was sitting against the far wall of his cell with his hat on his knee, turning it in his hands with the specific movement of someone doing something familiar to keep their hands occupied, and he looked up when you appeared at the bars and his face did something complicated and immediate.

"Oh good," he said, very quietly, with the warmth of someone who had been worried and was very relieved to have a specific reason not to be. "There you are."

"Here I am," you said.

"You look terrible," he said, with such affection that it worked as the opposite of the insult it was.

"You're in a cell," you said.

"Fair point lass," He came to the bars and looked at you with the close, assessing attention of someone checking something important. "They're treating you alright? Up there?"

"Fine," you said. "Dinner was—very elvish. I accidentally insulted a vintage wine."

Bofur's expression developed into something that was trying very hard not to be a grin and losing. "How?"

"I said it had gone foul." you said firmly. ""Two thousand year old—swill, In my opinion."

Bofur pressed his fist to his mouth, shoulders shaking silently, and you pressed your hand to the bars and he put his over it for a moment, warm and solid.

"Go find the others," he said. "Don't you stay down here too long."

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

Thorin was standing when you reached him, not sitting against the wall—standing at the bars with the particular contained stillness of a man who had been standing at the bars for some time and was not going to be caught sitting down by the circumstance.

He looked at you, and the look had several things in it and was very quiet about all of them.

"You should not be here," he said, low.

"I know," you said.

"If they find you in the cells—"

"I know, I know," you sighed. "I just needed to—" You stopped. "I needed to check on you."

He looked at you for a long moment. "I'm in a cell, there is nothing to check." he said, which was Thorin's version of I'm alright, a statement of facts that answered the question without using any of the words that would have made it personal.

"I know," you said, for the third time, which was apparently all you had tonight, and it was almost funny enough to be a relief. "Is everyone—"

"No injuries beyond what we came in with." He looked at your shoulder, where the poultice had left a faint outline under the fabric. "Your shoulder."

"One of the spiders got me, but It's fine," you said, with a dismissive gesture. "They have—there's a healer. It's being treated."

Something in his jaw made a small adjustment before he peeled his eyes off your shoulder and back to your eyes. "Good," he said. "You should go back, before your caught."

"In a moment," you said.

"Now," he said, and the word had the particular quality of urgency and perhaps even a please underneath it, though he would not say please, you both knew that.

"Not yet." you said, and moved further down the corridor.

Balin's cell was the last, he was sitting—this was your first indication that the incarceration had cost him something, because Balin sat when he was tired in a way he rarely admitted to otherwise, he was sitting against the back wall of the cell with his hands in his lap and his eyes on the passage entrance. They found you the moment you appeared, and what happened in them was something he immediately, deliberately arranged his expression around, but you were there for the first half-second before the arrangement happened, and you saw it.

He rose, crossed the cell. His hands came to the bars.

"Kiyanê," he said, very quietly, and this time he didn't catch it afterward, didn't look away or redirect or clear his throat. He said it and let it be said.

"Hi," you said, and your voice came out slightly wobbly, the way voices came out when you'd been holding something together for long enough that the proximity of one specific person made the holding harder.

"You're all right," he said. It was not a question, but it was checking.

"I'm all right," you said.

"The shoulder?"

"Being treated. It's fine."

"Good." His hands on the bars adjusted—not tighter, but shifted, deliberate. "Have you eaten?"

"Thranduil made me sit through a feast, Balin."

"Did you eat it?"

"Yes," you said, and then, because it was Balin "Most of it. There was wine, I had a—there was an incident with the wine."

Something moved behind his eyes. "An incident."

"I told them it had gone foul."

Balin looked at you for a long moment with the expression of a man deciding whether to address the content of what he'd just been told or simply file it for later.

"Good, proably was off." he scoffed, the scoff doing the work of holding back several, less pleasant opinions. "The whole cellars probably filled with Elvish swill."

You looked at him through the bars—the white of his beard in the dim light of the lower corridor, the particular solid steadiness of him that had been one of the first things you'd noticed and had not stopped being true through any of what the journey had brought into your path. You moved forward, put your arms through the bars as far as they'd go, your hands against his coat.