• Wandering Words •

"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.

It was not a hug. The geometry of bars prevented it, the cold metal between you, your arms extended in the only direction they could go. But you pressed your forehead briefly to the iron and held on to his coat, and his hand came up—through the bars, one broad thumb against your cheek, the weight of it exactly what it was and not anything else.

"You're all right," he said again. The second time he'd said it, each time it meant something slightly different—the first had been checking, this one was settling. Telling it to himself as much as to you.

"I know," you said. "Are you—"

"Go back to your room," he said, gently. His thumb swept against your cheek, just once, and then he withdrew his hand and straightened. The composure was back, neat and complete, but you'd seen the thirty seconds before it.

"Before the guard comes. Go back. And—" His eyes held yours through the bars with the particular, weighted clarity he had when something was important. "Don't do this again. It's too much risk."

"I needed to know you were all right," you said.

"And now you know," he said. "Go on Lass."

You looked at him for one more second. Then stepped back from the bars, looked at the corridor, and went.

The staircase back up was longer than it had been going down, the way staircases always were on the return, and by the time you reached the narrow arch and the junction and the carved corridors of the upper levels, the ambient light of the stone had shifted toward the pale register of very early morning.

You looked at his hand. At the pack strap on your shoulder—Beorn's pack, which had approximately nothing in it that mattered militarily, a blanket, a waterskin and the small collection of useful odds and ends you'd been rebuilding since the goblin tunnels.

You took the pack off and handed it over, the Elf went through it efficiently and without comment. Set it aside with the rest of the company's goods. Then looked at the pocket at the side seam of the dress—you'd always suspected this would be a problem eventually, the pocket being one of Radagast's dress's less obvious features and held out his hand again.

Your hand went to the pocket before you'd fully decided it was going to.

"Hand it to me." Flat. Final. Not loud.

From the line of the company, three feet away, you heard a sound that was not quite a word—something from Balin's direction, something from Bofur's, the particular compressed quality of people who had opinions they were containing by sheer force of will.

You took your hand away from the pocket and held it at your side, and the Elf reached across and found the pocket himself, and produced the vial of oil.

He looked at it. Turned it over. The contents were clear and entirely innocuous to look at, which was, you thought, the best thing you had going for you at this precise moment.

Another elf, still holding his arrow toward the company looked at you with cool, complete assessment. Auburn haired, armoured in the greens and browns of the forest, the armour so well-suited to the trees around it that looking directly at the elves felt like looking at something that kept rearranging itself at the edge of your vision.

Pointed ears. Your brain catalogued this automatically now, with the particular resigned efficiency of someone who had updated their working definition of races some time ago and no longer found it remarkable—or found it remarkable in a way they'd learned to manage.

"You are trespassing," the elf said, in flat, accented Common—the tone of someone using a language they considered beneath them for the sake of clarity rather than courtesy. "In the realm of the Woodland King. You will state your purpose."

"Our purpose," Thorin said, with the controlled quiet of a man who was choosing his words and his volume with the specific intention of not giving anyone a reason to release an arrow, "is passage. Nothing more."

"Dwarves do not pass through these lands," the elf said. The bow did not lower. "Without leave."

A second elf had crossed the clearing during this exchange and arrived in front of Fíli with the particular, pointed attention of someone who had been told to do something and was doing it. "Your weapons," the elf said.

Fíli looked at him. Then at Thorin. Then produced the first knife with the deliberate, unhurried movement of someone cooperating under protest, setting it in the elf's open hand with a precision that communicated everything he wasn't saying aloud.

The elf looked at the knife. Then looked at Fíli.

"All of them," he said.

Fíli's expression remained entirely composed. He produced a second knife from the back of his belt. Then a third from his boot. Then a fourth from somewhere in his coat that required a moment of searching to locate. Then a fifth, which was strapped to his forearm and required unbuckling. Then a sixth, which was smaller than the others and had been in his inner pocket. The elf received each one with the increasing expression of a person doing a count they had not expected to reach this high.

Fíli patted himself down with the theatrical thoroughness of a man demonstrating cooperation. The elf looked at the accumulated collection of blades in his hands. Then at Fíli. Then at the blades again.

He moved his hand into the leftmost side of Fíli's coat and removed a seventh dagger with thumb and forefinger before moving on.

Behind you, someone in the company made a sound that was absolutely suppressed laughter being converted into a cough at the last possible moment.

Your own search was less dramatic and more uncomfortable. The elf— moved through your pockets with a methodical, impersonal efficiency that would have reminded you of airport security in a different lifetime, his hands found the stub of charcoal, a small folded cloth and a segment of dried fruit from Bombur that you'd been saving.

"The oil's just," you offered. "Cooking oil. It's—it's nothing important."

The elf looked at you with the expression of someone deciding whether this was true, in the manner of someone who had heard considerably more creative lies than yours and was not overwhelmed by the current offering.

He set the vial aside with the rest of your confiscated items.

"Hey —c'mon that's—" you started.

"If it is a oil for cooking, it will be returned to you," he said, which was not a promise, and moved on.

You looked at where the vial had gone. At the pile of the company's collected weapons accumulating in a basket one of the elves was carrying. At Kíli beside you, who had been divested of his own effects with less patience than Fíli and was now standing with the flat, contained expression of someone managing considerable feelings about the experience.

The cuffs came next a heavy iron, linked with a short chain—they were heavier than you'd expected, the metal cold and smooth with the quality of something that had been well-made for a specific purpose, and they moved with a sound that was entirely unambiguous about what there purpose was.

Across the circle, Balin looked at your wrists, and then at the ground in front of him, with the controlled expression of a man exercising enormous restraint on something that was costing him seasons worth of age to restrain.

Not the worst thing you could be wearing, you attempt to tell yourself, not the thing you'd have designed for comfort, but functional rather than punitive in their construction. The weight of them was real and particular as they closed around your wrists with the sound of something being made final, you felt it not so much in your wrists as somewhere further in, the specific, cold clarity of this is real, and simultaneously this is actually happening.

Bofur caught your eye. His expression did something—a small tightening, a quality of looking at you and looking away, and then back—that communicated something in the same register as Balin's. He looked at the trees instead.

The elves were entirely unmoved by any of you, which was its own answer about how often they may done this.

Thorin, across the line, looked at the cuffs on your wrists and then directly ahead at the lead elf, and nothing on his face moved, but the angle of his jaw changed and you knew enough, by now, to read what nothing on Thorin's face meant when he was choosing it very carefully.

They marched you two abreast, the company paired off with the resigned efficiency of people who had been moving together long enough to manage it without instruction and you found yourself beside Ori, which you suspected was not accidental—Ori who was one of the youngest of the company in the specific way of being young but no less competent due to age, who had gone pale with a completeness that his complexion didn't usually allow, who was walking with the stiff, careful posture of someone controlling their breathing with deliberate effort and not entirely succeeding.

You couldn't touch him, not in any way that could prove particularly helpful, but you could walk close enough that your good shoulder occasionally contacted his, the warm, simple pressure of another person present and not going anywhere.

From further along the line, in the low, careful register of people keeping their voices beneath the Elves' hearing, the company began to talk. In Khuzdul. The switch was seamless, the language moving through the column like a current, and the Elves' faces showed no particular response to it— whether because they didn't understand it or because they'd decided not to indicate that they might, you couldn't tell.

You caught pieces. Not sentences—your Khuzdul was too piecemeal for full sentences still, even with the months of practice it had only given you vocabulary and a working sense of rhythm but not the grammar for connected meaning. But pieces, arrived like individual stones rather than a path

From somewhere near the front, in Thorin's lower register, something that was harder to catch—a word you knew meaning near or stay close and then something else, and then a word you didn't know, and then Balin's voice replying, steady and deliberate, with the particular tone he used when he was reassuring someone in a way that didn't sound like reassurance.

The formation was practical and deliberate—an elf at every second pair, one ahead and one behind the column, arrows back in quivers but hands ready in the particular comfortable proximity to weapons that meant the readiness was not hypothetical. The path moved deeper into the forest, and the forest moved around you in the way Mirkwood's forest moved, which was not like any other forest you'd walked through.

You'd adapted to certain qualities of Mirkwood—the close darkness, the particular quality of sound in it, the way the light never quite reached the ground with any conviction, the sense of being observed by something that did not necessarily distinguish between observer and subject in a way you found uncomfortable. The trees had a quality of attention that other trees did not have, or you'd convinced yourself they did, which amounted to the same thing in terms of how you moved through it.

But the forest ahead of the elves' was different. The floor was changing beneath your feet as you walked—the damp, rotting quality of deep Mirkwood giving way incrementally, the thick, unhealthy smell thinning by degrees, the undergrowth shifting from the tangled, invasive dark growth of the forest's interior to something cleaner, ferns, the occasional flower, small and pale. The quality of the air changed last, the particular staleness clearing into something that actually moved, carried from somewhere ahead.

The trees thinned the forest became, gradually, something different—still old, still enormous in the way of ancient things, but alive in a way that the earlier forest hadn't been, the green of it a real green rather than the grey-green of rot and shadow. The light that came through the canopy here was actual light, warm and dappled, and the effect of it after the darkness of the forest proper was so immediately different that several members of the company visibly adjusted to it, shoulders releasing by a fraction, breathing shifting.

"Dartho!" said one of the elves near the front, and the column stopped. Ori stumbled slightly on the halt and caught himself, and the sound he made—quiet, barely audible—was the sound of someone doing their best and finding their best harder than usual to achieve. You moved without deciding to, the small shift of your position that put you directly beside him, your arm pressing against his in the cramped two-abreast formation.

He looked at you and you did you best to offer him some kind of warmth, but weren't sure you succeed in any sufficient way.

The elves' expressions remained at their default setting of cool, composed disinterest, though one toward the back of the column had tilted his head slightly in the manner of someone listening to something in a second language and finding it worth attention.

The column began moving again. You watched the forest. You watched the elves' faces when the path gave you angles on them—the ones whose disinterest was genuine, simply the professional remove of guards who had done this many times, and the ones whose disinterest was performing something else, the ones whose eyes moved over the dwarves and over you with a quality that was several degrees colder than neutrality. Two of them near the front, older-looking, though with elves you couldn't begin to calibrate what older meant. The way they looked at Thorin and then looked away with a specific, pointed quality that was not quite hostility and was not quite anything else.

You kept walking, the cuffs cold against your wrists, and looked at the trees, and tried to breathe evenly, and thought about the vial of oil somewhere behind you, and about the fact that you were walking in chains through a forest you didn't know to a destination that had not been explained, and that the appropriate response to this situation probably involved being more frightened than you currently were, though you suspected the absence of excess fear was less composure and more the specific emotional numbness of someone who had exceeded their daily processing capacity.

The bridge came first—a structure of carved stone spanning a ravine below, the stone so precisely fitted that from above it looked like a single piece of the mountain's bones rather than anything made by hands. Beyond the bridge, cut into the rock face itself doors.

The doors were enormous. Not in the apologetic way of something built large for practical reasons, but in the deliberate, architectural way of something built to a scale that was a statement. Heavy stone, carved with a density of detail that your eyes couldn't resolve into individual elements from this distance—the whole surface moving with it, a depth of craft that was overwhelming as much as it was decorative. They stood open, the interior beyond them dim and vast, with the specific quality of a space that was both enclosed and limitless, like standing at the entrance to a mountain and feeling the mountain breathe.

The faces of them carved with a density of pattern that your eye tracked and lost and tracked again, the interlocking of it too complex to follow in any single place. They hummed, slightly, not loudly, not in any way you could have explained to anyone else, but the quality of standing near them was the quality of standing near something that was operating, continuously, at a frequency you weren't quite sure you where actually hearing. The same quality, distantly, that Thorin had described in the deep halls of Erebor, though he'd attributed that to the forges. This was not a forge, it was a set of doors, simply—stone arranged by very old hands with a very clear intention, and the intention hummed.

They opened inward at a signal from the leading Elf, and the sound of them was deep and final and entirely deliberate, and then you were walking through, and the stone closed behind you.

The hall beyond was not what you'd expected from the outside inside was—not dark. You'd expected dark. What you found was a particular quality of light that had no obvious source, coming off the stone itself in the same ambient way that Rivendell's stone held daylight—but this was different from Rivendell's warmth, cooler, deeper, the light of something held rather than something lifted. The ceilings vaulted above you into shadows that the light didn't entirely penetrate, and from the ceilings hung—things, carved things, the continuation of the exterior work but more intimate up close, the density of it filling every surface without crowding any of them, a carved network of branches and roots and stars and figures whose stories you didn't have yet.

The walkways were open. This was, you registered, the strangest thing architecturally—for a space that was unmistakably some kind of fortress, it had the quality of a forest given form in stone, all vertical openness and horizontal span and bridges between levels that had no walls, the enclosure coming from the rock itself rather than from any structure built inside it. It was simultaneously the most enclosed and the most open space you'd ever been in.

"These are the Halls of the Woodland Realm," said one of the elves, addressing the company with the flat, informational tone of someone reading a notice. "No one leaves here but by the king's consent."

The company had gone quiet. Thorin was looking at the walls with an expression that would have been impossible to read from any distance but was, from your position in the column, recognisable—the particular compression of him that happened when he was managing something significant, when the management cost more than his face showed.

Then the lead elf gestured, and the company was divided. It happened quickly and without sufficient warning. The elves toward the back of the column moved forward, and the front section —

Thorin stopped entirely, with the specific, planted quality of a very heavy object that has decided it is not moving, and the guard behind him walked into the decision and had to redirect, and for a moment the column caught itself on the halt.

"The company stays together," Thorin said. Quiet. Absolute.

The lead Elf turned. Looked at Thorin with the composed, unhurried attention of someone who had been told things before by people who'd thought they had authority and had continued on regardless. "Your company," he said, "goes where it is directed."

"Thorin—" Balin's voice, warning.

Both you and Thorin—were separated from the middle by two bodies of guards inserting themselves between, and the direction changed. The company was being redirected toward a descending passage, its opening visible between two carved pillars, and the direction of it was unmistakably downwards.

"Where are you taking them?" Thorin's voice, sharp and immediate, his feet planted. Two of the guards had positioned themselves at his sides, and he turned his head between them with the specific, controlled fury of a man choosing his battles in real time. His eyes found you and something in them did something he immediately managed back behind his expression.

"The lower levels," said the lead elf.

"We go together," Thorin repeated. "Or not at all."

"Your company," the Elf said again, with a patience that was its own form of finality, "Will be housed. You—and the—Lady in your company—" A look at you, brief and assessing, "—go to the Elvenking."

"Housed," Dwalin said, with a weight that communicated his opinion of this word choice comprehensively.

"Thorin—" you started, not sure what you were going to say after it, the word arriving before the sentence was ready.

The moment that followed was the specific kind of moment that you had learned, over the course of this journey, to recognise—the moment in which Thorin calculated what was available to him, what it cost, and what it would cost if he did or did not take it. His jaw set, his eyes moved to the company—to Balin, to Fíli and Kíli, to Dwalin, to each of them in turn with the fast, specific attention of a man committing something to memory.

Balin was at your side within three steps, he held your eyes for one moment, the particular look he had when something mattered and he was compressing it into something small enough to deliver without the situation exploiting it into outright concern.

"We'll be alright," Balin said, the steadiness of it was for everyone, distributed evenly among the company and including you specifically, in the particular way Balin's steadiness was always distributed. "We'll be fine lass."

You were pulled sharply left, Then the guards moved Balin forward and the passage between you closed. Thorin was directed left with you, two guards bracketing him with the expression of people prepared for him to make this difficult and trained to manage it regardless.

"This way," said an elf at your elbow.

"We're not—shouldn't we stay together, we should all—" you tried.

"Tolo," the elf said, unmoved, and you moved.

The company went right and down, and the sound of their footsteps receded, and then the junction was behind you and the passage ahead was narrower and the stone on either side was not carved in the warm, intricate patterns of the outer halls but smooth and cool and unornamented.

You walked. The weight of the cuffs was biting and undeniably present, the throne room was at the end of a climb that your shoulder informed you about every other step.

The cut had stiffened over the walk, the fabric of the dress adhering to it in the specific, unpleasant way of dried blood finding a surface it could cling to, each time you lifted your arm for the chain of the cuffs or to accommodate a step, the shoulder reminded you it was there. You kept your face even. The guards either didn't notice or didn't consider it their concern.

Then the passage opened, and the throne room was a held breath. You understood this from the pathway, before you'd processed any of the specifics—the quality of the air in it, the particular silence of a space that absorbed sound rather than reflecting it, the specific, atmospheric weight of a room that was accustomed to being significant and had the unguarded open architecture to match.

The pillars were carved from the living rock, which you understood now to mean something different from what you'd have understood it to mean before this journey—not stone that had been quarried and repositioned but stone that the carving had found in place, the pillars emerging from the floor as continuations of what the floor was made of, the ceiling descending to meet them in a single continuous piece of mountain. The carvings followed the grain of the rock the way Balin followed a line of thought—not imposing on it but working within it, the images of trees and stars and figures with the specific patient quality of art made without a deadline.

At the far end, elevated on a staircase that climbed more levels than any practical function required was a throne.

Antlers. This was the detail that arrived first, because it was the scale of it—an arrangement of enormous antlers rising from and behind the throne in an arc that filled the upper portion of your field of vision, light but complex against the pale stone, the arrangement deliberate and composed and precisely as much as it needed to be and no more. Below them, the throne itself, carved from the same continuous rock, and ascending toward you both in the time it took you to process all of this the Elvenking himself.

He was tall in the way that made every other dimension of the space recalibrate. Taller than Lindir, taller than the guards, taller than anyone you'd stood near in this world, save for Beorn, His robes were pale, the colour of winter light, and his hair was—you'd expected something, after Rivendell, some sense of what Elves looked like, Rivendell had given you that basis, but this was different, the particular quality of this Elf's face colder and more deliberate, the beauty of it the beauty of something that was not trying to be beautiful and didn't need to.

He descended the staircase rather than waiting at the top of it, which was—a choice, you thought, a deliberate spatial choice, and reached the floor and crossed it toward where the guards had positioned Thorin and yourself side by side, and stood before you both with the composed, complete attention of someone who had been waiting for this conversation.

Two guards had been positioned to the side. Close enough to be present. Far enough to be outside the conversation's geometry.

"It has been a long time," Thranduil said, "since Thorin Oakenshield traveled so far east. For what purpose? Where does your journey end?"

Thorin said nothing, which was not a refusal to speak so much as a refusal to answer that particular question on those particular terms.

Thranduil moved with the unhurried grace of someone who had infinite patience and was not performing it—it simply was he circled, slowly, a wide arc that took him around the outside of the space Thorin occupied without approaching directly. "Some may imagine," he said, "that a noble quest is at hand. A quest to reclaim a homeland—" He paused, and the pause had a considered quality. "—and slay a dragon." He came to rest again, facing Thorin at a precise angle. "I myself suspect a more prosaic motive. Attempted burglary. Or something of that ilk."

Thorin's jaw was a solid immovable line.

"You have found a way in," Thranduil continued, with the patient, unhurried precision of someone who had thought this through and was now presenting conclusions. "You seek that which would bestow upon you the right to rule. The King's Jewel—The Arkenstone." He let this land.

Thranduil's gaze shifted then, cool and assessing, to you, you felt the weight of it at once—an ancient, unblinking regard that seemed to take your measure in a single glance. A coil of nerves tightened in your chest like frost painting itself over a window pane, you forced yourself not to shift.

"It is precious to you beyond measure. I understand that." A pause. "There are gems in the mountain that I too desire. White gems of pure starlight. I offer you my help."

Something shifted in Thorin's posture—not visibly or dramatically, but perceptible to anyone who had spent enough time reading the particular language of how Thorin held himself. "I am listening," he said.

"I will let you go," Thranduil said, "if you but return what is mine."

"A favor," Thorin said, "for a favor."

"You have my word," Thranduil said with an incline of his head. "One king to another."

Thorin had been standing still and now he went stiller, which was a different thing, the specific stillness of someone deciding to say the thing they'd been managing not to say. When he spoke his voice was level and then not level, the control of it finding its edge. "I would not trust Thranduil the great king to honor his word should the end of all days be upon us."

Thranduil's expression turned to one of unguarded disbelief.

"You who lack all honor." Thorin's voice was rising now,both in volume and in the heat that lived just under his control when the nature of language was insufficient the fury in your chest. "I have seen how you treat your friends. We came to you once, starving, homeless, seeking your help. But you turned your back. You turned away from the suffering of my people—" Thorin spat the words at him before lifting his chin a clear defiance in his eyes.

"Imrid amrâd ursul!” you did not need to understand the Khuzdul Thorin shouted, to know the intent of it.

"Do not," Thranduil said, and his voice had changed —still quiet, but something beneath the quiet had shifted, something moving under the surface with the particular quality of pressure contained rather than absent, "talk to me of dragon fire. I know it's wrath and ruin."

He turned, and his face was in a different light for a moment, and the scars appeared. "I have faced the great serpents of the North."

They climbed his face in lines and gougers that the light had previously hidden—old burns, deep and extensive, one side of his face mapped with a extensive burn with the quality of it being done to it under extreme duress, the skin's surface changed irrevocably, and it was there and clear and—

You made a sound. Small. Involuntary. The sharp intake of breath of someone who has been presented with something unexpected, and had not managed the surprise quietly enough.

The throne room went very still.

Thorin turned his head toward you. Thranduil turned his face—slowly, with the composed precision of someone who has had practice at this—until his eyes found you again.

You looked at the floor. Immediately, directly, down at the stone and your own feet, because your face was hot and your heart was going and you had not meant to make that sound, had not meant it at all and you could feel both of them looking at you and you kept your eyes down and focused very hard on a specific point on the floor in front of your feet.

The pause extended.

Then Thranduil turned back to face forward, and the light shifted, and the scars were gone—or rather, the angle that had shown them was gone, the light falling differently, the composed and perfect surface of his face presented itself again as if the other version had not been there.

You kept your eyes down. You had not—you were not—it wasn't disgust or distress that's not what the sound had been intended to mean, but you didn't know how to say that, and you were not going to attempt to say it in front of guards while Thorin and the Elvenking were in the middle of an argument, so you kept your eyes down and your mouth firmly shut, whatever the history was between Elves and Dwarves and mountains and jewels, you had not been brought here to add to the inventory of things this Elf-king carried in his face.

When you looked up, it was because the silence had the quality of having changed shape—you found Thranduil speaking to one of the guards, in Elvish, his voice quiet and his expression entirely composed, his eyes directed away from both of you with the complete, deliberate attention of someone demonstrating where their attention lay.

The guard said something back, brief and deferential. Thranduil nodded, once, and turned back to Thorin.

"I warned your grandfather of what his greed would summon, but he would not listen," he said, and the sentence had more weight than its words. "You are just like him."

The composure was complete again, whatever had moved beneath it resettled his voice had resumed its smooth, controlled quality, the exchange of the last thirty seconds incorporated into the room without seam. "Stay here if you will, and rot. I am patient. I can wait." The faintest pause.

"A hundred years is a mere blink in the life of an Elf. However mortal lives—" His eyes moved, briefly, from Thorin to you, and the quality of the look was something you couldn't name—not warm, not cold, but noted, the way a specific detail is noted when it changes the character of a larger accounting of matters. "—are not so generous." He looked back at Thorin.

"I hope, for all your sakes, that you come to a reasonable conclusion before the question becomes more—academic." Thranduil nodded to the guards.

The guards moved. Thorin did not go willingly, in the sense that he moved—not actively fighting, not in the way that would have given them a reason to use force, but with the particular resistant quality of a dwarf who was going to leave on his own terms or make the alternative as difficult as possible, his feet finding purchase on the stone floor with the stubborn, planted deliberateness of someone who had decided leaving required more justification than he'd been given.

"This is not finished," he said, to Thranduil's back, because Thranduil had already turned away with the composed finality of someone for whom it was finished. "You cannot simply—"

"I can," Thranduil said, without turning, without raising his voice, the two words carrying the specific, untroubled authority of someone who has been interrupted many times and has long since stopped finding it of any interest. "And I have."

The guards took hold a firmer hold of Thorin's arms.

"You cannot separate us, she is—" The words came out at a volume that had no ambiguity in it, filling the throne room with a resonance that the stone returned from every carved surface—defiance converted to its most concentrated form, pure and without destination.

"Please your majesty if—" you began only to be cut of by the cool unwavering gaze of Thranduil.

"Take him," Thranduil said, to the guards, without looking away from you.

They dragged Thorin. He did not go quietly, his voice continuing from the corridor in the particular way of sound that stone carries long after the person making it has left the room—Thorin's voice, rising, stripped of the management he usually kept over it, the anger in it raw and genuine and absolutely without purchase on anything in this hall.

You stood very still, your eyes having slid from the Elvenking's back to the space between your feet.

You heard his voice from the corridor. Then from further away. Then not at all.

The throne room settled back into its ambient quiet with the composed indifference of a space that had absorbed louder things than this and considered none of them its business.

Thranduil stood near the far pillars, his back omce again to the room, his hands behind him, looking at the carved stone wall with the expression of someone reading something at a considerable distance. He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he turned, to regard you, and the expression had resettled—not cold, not warm, simply present, the quality of attention that didn't offer anything about what was happening behind it.

You were now the remaining figure in a space built for someone else's significance, and that someone else was watching you from the middle of his own floor with an expression you couldn't read at all.

Thranduil was—not what you'd expected of an Elf King, though you hadn't known what to expect. Not warm in the way Elrond's dry humor had been warm. Not open in the way Lindir had been open. Elrond's welcome had been genuine and quiet, this was something more lateral than that, the specific quality of someone who had decided what they thought of most things long ago and extended that framework to new situations without much modification. The quality of him was not performed—it wasn't a mask over something else, it was simply the register he operated in, the natural temperature of a person who had found most things both amusing and insufficient over what your were beginning to suspect was a very long period of time.

He looked at you. You looked at him. The room seemed to hum, very faintly, in the way the stone doors did.

"You are not a dwarf," he said.

"No," you said. Your voice came out smaller than you'd intended it to, in the way voices sometimes did in rooms with very high ceilings. You straightened your back, which helped marginally.

Thranduil looked at you for a moment with the patient, assessing quality he'd brought to Thorin, though the temperature of it was different—less pointed, more curious, the assessment of something unfamiliar rather than something known and in disagreement with.

"You are not of Gondor," he said, with the finality of something being ruled out rather than asked. "You travel with dwarves, and you wear the dress of—" The faintest pause, a quality of consideration. "—the Rohirrim." He tilted his head a fraction. "Who are you?"

"I'm—I'm just a person," you said. "I came to be with the company by accident and I've been traveling with them since." You looked down at your cuffed hands, then back up, because continuing to look down felt wrong in a way you couldn't fully articulate. "I'm not—I'm not a threat. None of us are. We were just trying to get through the forest."

Thranduil received this with the composure of someone taking information in without yet committing to an opinion about it. He looked at your shoulder—the one the spider had caught, the dried blood on the fabric of the dress visible from here, you suspected, from the particular quality of the glance.

He said something to the guard at the door behind you. Elvish, low, brief—two or three words, the inflection of a directive rather than a question. The guard replied and left, and the room was quieter.

"Someone will attend to your wound," Thranduil said, returning his gaze to the middle distance. "Then you will be shown to a room."

You thought about the company. About the cells. About Balin's voice at the junction, steady and deliberate, we'll be alright. About Thorin going through that door and the defiance with which he left.

"What about the dwarves?" you said.

Thranduil ascended two steps of his staircase and stopped there, his robes settling around him with the quiet of very fine fabric doing exactly what it was meant to do.

"Will remain below," he said, "until Thorin Oakenshield decides to be reasonable." He paused to settle himself in his throne.

"Which I am told may take some time."

The guard beside you made the patient gesture toward the door. You looked at the staircase, at the Elvenking, poised on his throne with the composed stillness of someone who had ended the conversation and did not have any need to communicate its ending.

You followed the guard out.

The cells in the lower levels of the Woodland Realm were not—quite—what the word cell suggested to anyone who had only encountered the word in a modern context. They were cut from the same rock as the rest of the halls, individual spaces separated by bars of dark greenish iron that were more precisely made than any prison bars you'd have imagined—no rust, no imperfection, fitted to the stone with the same quality of craft that went into everything in this place, which somehow made them worse rather than better. The ambient light reached even here, dimmer, but present.

Each member of the company had been given their own cell, Balin sat on the stone bench that served as a bed and catalogued what he could determine of the situation with the methodical calm of a dwarf who had been in difficult positions before and understood that the mind was more useful than emotions in the immediate aftermath of one.

The cell to his left contained Dwalin, who was standing with his back to the bars, arms folded, communicating his opinion of the architecture through posture alone. Two to the right, Bofur, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the manner of someone who had decided that if you were going to be in a place against your will, you might as well be comfortable doing it.

Thorin was now in the cell right of him, he was not sitting, he had not sat since he'd been deposited here. He stood at the bars with his hands around two of them, not gripping—just resting, the contact point of a dwarf who needed something to stand near while he thought and stared at the empty cell opposite with the particular compressed expression that Balin had known for a very long time and didn't not need to see to understand or read accurately.

"Thorin."

The word arrived with the quality Balin used when he was establishing contact first and asking questions second, the check-in before the debrief.

Thorin exhaled. "Aye,"

A pause. "Where is the lass?"

Thorin looked at the wall. At the door. At the ceiling of the cell, which curved away from him in the smooth, impersonal arc of stone that had been here before anyone who currently occupied it and intended to remain afterward.

"Thranduil separated us in the throne room," he said. "She was still there when I was removed."

The silence from Balin's side of the wall had a texture—the specific texture of a man receiving information he had already half-expected and was not made more comfortable by having confirmed.

"She'll be alright," Balin said, the certainty in it was the particular certainty of a dwarf willing it to be true rather than knowing it to be true. "She's—she's bright. The Elf-king is not—" He paused, choosing. "He keeps his own code."

"His code," Thorin said, "has put her alone in a hall full of elves she does not know, without any of us."

Balin said nothing, the lower levels settled into a quieter noise—the ambient sound of thirteen dwarves redistributing their collective energy into the medium of individual cells, which was a process that involved muttering and Bombur's sigh, which was recognisable through two walls.

"Thorin," Balin said, after sufficient silence had established itself, settled and passed.

Thorin did not answer immediately.

"Did he offer you a deal?"

A pause. Thorin's hands on the bars did not move. "He did,"

Balin waited.

"I told him," Thorin said, with the flat, precise enunciation of a dwarf delivering a verdict he had arrived at and had no intention of revisiting, "he could go îsh kakhfê ai-'d dûr-rugnu."

Down the row, Dwalin turned from the wall. Several cells further along, someone who had been very quiet made a small sound.

"Him," Thorin continued, with and increase in his volume as if that alone would send his words to the Elvenking, "and all his kin."

Balin sat with this for a moment. He looked at the bars of his own cell. At the light coming off the stone. At the particular geometry of their current situation, which he had been mapping since the throne room and which he now completed mapping to its logical conclusion.

"Well," he said, with the careful steadiness of a man who understood that 'I told you' so served no purpose and that 'what do we do now' didn't serve better,

"that's that, then." He folded his hands in his lap. "A deal was our only hope."

You were checking the straps on the one you'd been assigned—a broad grey animal with an almost absurdly level gaze that had accepted your presence immediately and with no drama, which you considered the beginning of a meaningful relationship—for what was probably the third time.

"Okay," you said, to the pony, adjusting the girdle one more time and finding it, again, exactly as it had been. "Okay, so—we're going into a forest, and I need you to be very good about this, and I promise when we get to the other side we'll let you go home to your Daddy—"

"Stupid thing to say, I am not their father."

The voice was very large and very close, you turned, Beorn stood approximately six feet away, which at Beorn's dimensions was a proximity you registered physically before you registered it intellectually, his expression carried the air of a man who had a specific relationship with the truth of things and preferred it to be accurately represented.

"I—" You looked at the pony. At Beorn. "Right, no, I know you're—I meant it in a—it's an expression. Where I'm from. People say it about—about animals that—when someone takes care of something it's sort of—" You made a gesture that did not in any way clarify the situation. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—they're not literally your children, I understand that—"

"They are ponies," Beorn said, with a finality that covered the subject comprehensively and moved on from it in the same breath. He looked at the grey pony, then at you, with the measuring attention of a man assessing a pairing. "She will carry you well," he said. "She is steady. She does not frighten easily."

"She's been very good so far," you agreed, with the careful diplomacy of someone who was still finding their footing in the conversation.

"She knows the road to Mirkwood," Beorn said. "She has made it before." Something moved in his expression—not subtle, because subtlety was not Beorn's natural register, but complicated, in the way of large things that carried complicated histories. "She did not like it."

You looked at the grey pony. The grey pony looked back at you with what was either agreement or general equine calm, and you couldn't tell which, Beorn had already moved toward Gandalf with the long-strided purposefulness of a man who had said what he needed to say and was moving on.

Gandalf and Beorn stood apart from the company while the packing and mounting up was completed, their voices low enough that you caught only the rhythm of it rather than the words—something serious, from Beorn's end, something measured and receiving from Gandalf's. You watched them from the corner of your attention while you ran your hand once more along the grey pony's neck, feeling the warmth of her under your palm.

"Do not follow anywhere but the path," Beorn's voice, rising enough to carry. "The wood Elves of Mirkwood are not like their kin. They are less wise and more dangerous."

The company, which had been in various stages of mounting and adjusting packs, went quiet in the specific way it went quiet when information of consequence was being delivered.

"Do not," Beorn continued, and his eyes moved across the assembled company with a directness that suggested the warning was not merely advisory, "stray from the path."

Gandalf said something in return, too low to catch, and Beorn looked at him with the expression of a man who had made his point and considered its reception the listener's responsibility.

"We must make haste," Thorin said, from the front of the company, in the measured tone of a man who understood most words as a practical transaction as well as a social one. "The path grows no shorter for the time we spend upon it."

You swung up onto the grey pony with considerably more grace then your first attempt in this world yet somehow still far less grace than you'd have liked, compensated, settled, and found your seat. She didn't move until you asked her to, which was, in your experience of the company's ponies to date, not something you could assume, and you made a mental note to appreciate this about her.

"Ready?" Bofur appeared beside you, already mounted, his hat at its usual angle.

"Probably not," you said.

"Good," he said, cheerfully. "That's the correct way to be. Come on."

The ride to Mirkwood's border was, in the accounting of journeys undertaken since you'd arrived, one of the better ones.

The country between Beorn's and the forest spread out wide and grassy in the warm morning light—the sky overhead had the generous, open quality of sky with enough room in it to be honest about its own size. The grey pony moved with the smooth, even gait of an animal confident in its own competence, and you had relaxed, by the first hour, from the careful attention of someone managing a horse to the easier position of someone being carried by one.

You rode between Balin and Bofur for most of it, the natural configuration that had established itself over the course of the journey—the three of you in a loose triangle that contracted when the track narrowed and expanded in the open stretches, conversation running in the easy, intermittent way of people who had spent enough time together to be comfortable with both.

Balin was doing something with the smallest of his ledger's, having it balanced on his knee with the practiced ease of a dwarf who had apparently spent decades writing while moving. Bofur was whistling, the tuneless contented whistling of someone whose interior state was genuinely pleasant and required expression, which was very Bofur and which you had stopped trying to identify the tune of approximately three months ago.

At the head of the company, Thorin rode with Gandalf alongside, and from this distance you caught the occasional gesture—Thorin's hands, deliberate and precise when he was making a point, Gandalf's staff tracking something on the horizon—but not the words.

At some point Bofur switched and was now teaching you a Khuzdul word that was, as far as you could establish, the word for a specific type of hammer used in a specific type of stonework and had no real equivalent in any language, which made the lesson circular but pleasant. Balin was half-listening while reviewing something in the same ledger.

"He looks like a king when he rides like that," Bofur said, with the observational lightness of someone who was aware he was saying something and watching to see where it landed.

"He is a king," you said, to the grey pony's ears.

"Aye," Bofur said, and didn't say anything else about it, which was Bofur's version of discretion and was, you reflected, more effective than it looked.

You were working on the hammer word, which required a consonant cluster that your mouth was objecting to, and the road was wide and the light was good and the border of Mirkwood was still hours ahead.

"You're doing it again," said Bofur.

"I'm not doing anything,"

"The word," Bofur said. "You're still putting the g in. Listen." He said it again, clean and precise, and you tried to follow and the g appeared anyway, like an uninvited guest at a party your mouth was throwing without your full consent.

"My mouth does what it wants," you said.

"I wouldn't let that spread lass," said Bofur, with cheerful, entirely affectionate wickedness. "you'll get yourself a reputation."

Balin made a small sound beside you that might have been a cough or might have been the abbreviated beginning of a comment he'd decided not to finish.

"Don't," you said.

"I didn't say anything," Balin said, as he fixed Bofur with a look that served and succeeded in making his cheerful expression deflat into neutrality.

"The sound you made said something."

"The sound was entirely neutral," Balin said, with dignity, and returned to his ledger.

The grey pony tossed her head once, which you chose to interpret as agreement.

Mirkwood appeared on the horizon the way things that have been in the same place for a very long time appear—not gradually, but suddenly present, as though it had been there all along and you'd simply been the wrong angle on it. And then, as the company drew closer and the scale of it resolved, the appearing became something else entirely.

Dark. Not the dark of ordinary forest—not the pleasant, dappled shade of the trees you'd ridden through in the months before, the kind of dark that was simply the absence of direct sunlight. This was a different quality entirely, the canopy was too thick too tangled and far too old, the trees themselves enormous, twisted in a way that had nothing aesthetic about it, their roots upending the ground at the forest's edge in arching ridges of dark earth, the bark of them carrying a colour that was less tree and more something that had absorbed light for so long it had forgotten how to reflect anything back.

The smell reached you before you reached the tree line. Damp, yes, and old wood, yes, but underneath those things something else—an organic density, the smell of things decomposing over very long periods in very little air, the specific humidity of a place where sunlight hadn't reached the ground in decades.

You sat on the grey pony at the edge of the tree line and looked into the dark between the trees, and the grey pony shifted under you, one foot, then another, the first time she'd been unsettled on the whole ride.

"I know," you said to her, quietly. "I know. I don't like it either."

Gandalf said goodbye the way Gandalf did most things—with the quality of a man who had made a decision some time ago and was informing everyone else of it now rather than earlier, which was his general pattern with decisions the company might object to. The conversation he had with Bilbo was quiet and briefly separate from the rest, the two of them standing slightly to one side of the company while the packs were transferred and the ponies were sent back, and you watched from a distance and caught nothing of it except Bilbo's face, which went through several things in quick succession before settling on the particular resigned expression of a hobbit who consider everyone in the company a friend.

You shouldered the pack Beorn had lent you—canvas, large, smelling of hay and something herbal, considerably better quality than the handbag you'd lost in the goblin tunnels and fell into step beside Bilbo as the company moved toward the tree line.

"What did he say?" you asked, quietly.

"Nothing," Bilbo said.

"Bilbo."

"Things of a general nature," Bilbo said, which was the hobbit equivalent of I'm not telling you and you recognised it by now. "He said to stay on the path."

"Beorn said that."

"Gandalf also said it," Bilbo said, fidgeting with his hands. "So—doubly said."

You looked at the trees. Bilbo looked at the trees. The company filed in around you, and the forest closed over the first of them like a fist closing over a mouse, the light changed immediately—the particular, specific change of going from open country to enclosed space, the sky disappearing overhead behind the canopy.

The Humectant nature of the forest hit you like a wall—it was not warm, it was a place where moisture had nowhere to go, where the air had been sitting under the same canopy for so long it had become a kind of liquid itself, each breath carrying more of itself than air was meant to carry. Your clothes felt different within a hundred steps, the fabric heavier against your skin. The sound changed too—the outside world receded completely, not gradually but immediately, like a door closing and what replaced it was the interior sound of Mirkwood, which was very little. An occasional drip. The creak of an old branch. Underneath everything, the specific non-sound of a place where ordinary life had a different set of rules.

Kíli appeared at your elbow approximately two hours in, which was itself a comfort, because Kíli appearing at your elbow usually meant he was about to say something that was either useful or entertaining, frequently both.

"It's not so bad," he said, with the conviction of someone arguing himself into something.

You looked at the trees. At the webbing you could see between them—white and thick and old, not the fresh silk of active construction but the accumulated layering of many years of effort, coating the bark in sheets, stringing between branches in wide, translucent curtains that had gathered the debris of the forest—dead leaves, old wood, things you preferred not to look at to closely.

"Kíli," you said. "It's pretty bad."

"There are plenty of forests that look like this," he said.

"Name one," you said.

A pause. "The point is," he said, redirecting, "we're on the path. We stay on the path. We're fine."

The path was narrow—a single track through the root-upheaved ground, just wide enough for two abreast if you were careful, the company moved along it in the long, loose line that narrow paths dictated. Above and around you, the trees closed in at their own speed, the webbing and leaves thicker as you went further in, the light dimmer and more filtered, taking on a quality that was less light and more the memory of light—present but distant, arriving filtered through so many layers of canopy that it had lost most of what made it light by the time it reached you.

"It'll be fine," Kíli said, with slightly less conviction.

"Mmm," you said, which was a Balin word one you'd clearly absorbed.

The smell deepened as you walked. Whatever it was underneath the damp and the green—organic, thick, the smell of very old rot in still air—it strengthened with every hour, and by the time the first webs appeared linking themselves, like skeletal fingers stretching after slumber down to the forest floor, you were breathing through your mouth without having decided to.

"Stay on the path," Thorin said, from the front, and the words carried back through the company in the flat, clean way his directives always did when he meant them without discussion.

The webs had started small—strands between branches, the normal architecture of forest spiders, the kind of thing you'd walk through on an autumn morning and wipe off your face without particular alarm. Then larger. Then the specific, wrong-scale jump that happened when you registered one that was several feet across, strung between two trees with a thickness and tension that spoke of something considerably larger than anything you'd been comfortable with before.

"Kíli," you hissed.

"I see it," Kíli said, from close beside you. His voice was doing the thing voices did when the person producing them was very deliberately keeping them calm. "It's fine."

"That's enormous,"

"Lots of things are enormous, have you seen Dwalin's head ?" Kíli said with a michevious wink. "We are fine. Keep walking."

You immediately pressed your fist to your mouth to contain the burst of laughter that threatened escape.

"Kíli," Balin's voice, from behind you, with the tone of a dwarf who had noticed that Kíli was attempting to be reassuring and wanted it on record that he appreciated the effort, if not convinced by the content of that effort. "Let her be."

"I'm helping," Kíli said.

"You're chattering," Balin said. "There's a difference."

The river appeared out of the dark like something that had been waiting for you to arrive at it rather than something you'd walked toward.

It was black. Not dark-blue, not deep-green, not any of the colours water was permitted to be when light was involved—black, the colour of something that had been simmering in the undergrowth for a very long time and hadn't yet learnt how to reflect. The surface of it had a stillness that water wasn't supposed to have—cold, and old, and with a quality underneath those things that you couldn't name but that your body registered as something to pay attention to.

The crossing was a series of vines, the bridge long since rotted away, a series of fraying vines strung across the gap at varying heights doing the work the bridge should have done, the vines themselves thick and rope-like and clearly not new—old enough to have absorbed the moisture of the forest, their surfaces dark and slightly slick.

"I cant watch, I'll have a heart attack," you said, to no one in particular, watching Bilbo step onto the first vine with the careful, deliberate balance of a small person doing a calculation that involved very much darkness and very cold water directly below.

"He's fine," Fíli said, appearing beside you.

"He nearly slipped just then," you said.

"He recovered immediately."

"I saw him nearly slip—"

"He's a hobbit," Fíli said. "They have excellent feet."

"I'll give you an excellent foot," you muttered "straight into your—" you realized just how close to Balin you where starting to sound, you registered this before making the executive decision not to finish your sentence.

Bilbo made it to the other side with the careful, step-by-step progress of someone for whom falling in the black water was not a theoretical concern but a very specific one. The collective exhale from the company on the bank was audible.

You went close behind Thorin, which was where you'd been positioned when the crossing began, and the vines were not as stable as they'd looked from the bank—they moved with each step, the whole structure swaying in a slow, lateral way that your body did not enjoy, and you kept your eyes on the far bank and your hands tight and your feet careful, one step, the next step, don't look at the water.

You made it, Thorin had already turned to watch the crossing continue and you found yourself excepting his extended hand and standing beside him on the far bank, Bilbo on his other side, the three of you stood close together while the rest of the company made the crossing in ones and twos, the vines swaying, and nobody spoke, because the forest had a quality now that made speech feel like an intrusion.

You saw it before you registered what you were seeing—a shape, luminous in the way that white things in dark places were luminous, at the treeline across a clearing to your left, standing perfectly still. A Deer. Large, white, the kind of white that seemed to generate its own light rather than reflecting anyone else's, the antlers spreading above its head in a wide, branching arc that had something formal about it, something that suggested this particular animal and this particular space had an existing relationship you weren't party to.

Thorin's hand moved in slow motion, you watched his bow come up with the smooth, unhurried motion of a man whose hands knew what they were doing without requiring his thoughts to be involved, and the arrow was nocked before you'd processed what was happening, and your mouth was already open—you could feel the words forming, slow and strange, like speaking through something thicker than air.

"What're you—" you started, and the words came out slurred, wrong, the shape of them correct in your head but arriving in your mouth with the wrong weight. "Don't—" you managed.

"—Bad luck," Bilbo said, from beside you, and his voice had the same quality, the same slow strangeness of someone speaking from underwater. "It's bad luck—"

"I don't believe in luck," Thorin slurred as he loosed the arrow. "We make our own luck."

It missed. A clean miss, the white deer startled into motion the instant before impact, and in three strides it was gone, the white of it dissolving into the dark between the trees, and the clearing was empty, and the company stood at the edge of it in silence.

"Pretty deer," you heard yourself say, somewhere in the slow, thick quality of your own consciousness, the words arriving without your full participation in them.

Thorin turned to look at you. You looked at him. Something was wrong with the looking—with the quality of your attention on his face, which kept slipping sideways from the thing you were trying to look at, like trying to read in a dream.

"We keep moving," Thorin said, and his voice had the same quality yours did, the same thickness at the edges, and you watched his face saying it and felt the words arrive a half-second after his lips had finished forming them.

You walked in circles. You became aware of this at some point after it had been true, which was itself the most accurate description of what Mirkwood was doing to all of you—the awareness arriving late, always late, the processing of information delayed by whatever quality the forest air had that was making everything slow and thick and strange.

Arguments broke out. Not the sharp, particular arguments of people with clear positions—more the unfocused, low-grade friction of people who were too slow to properly manage their own irritation, voices rising and falling without fully arriving at anything. Glóin said something about the path. Someone—Nori, maybe—disagreed. Thorin's voice, trying to maintain the precision he brought to everything and not quite getting there.

"We've gone past that tree," you said, pointing at a tree with a root formation that had registered with you once already.

"All the trees look the same," Bofur said, but without his usual ease, the words heavy.

"Not this one," you said. "I saw it before. We've been here."

"She's right," Balin said, from beside you—he'd been beside you for most of this, you realised, without knowing when he'd got there, keeping pace with the steady, deliberate intention of someone who had decided to be there.

"We have not been going in circles," Thorin said.

"I think we have," Bilbo said.

"We haven't," Thorin said, and the certainty of it was real, the same flat conviction he brought to everything, but underneath it was the same slow blur that everything had now, and you watched his face saying it and weren't sure if the certainty was genuine or if it was the forest.

"I'm very tired," Ori said, from somewhere behind you, with the straightforward simplicity of someone too slow to be self-conscious about it.

"We keep moving," Thorin said.

"We should—" Balin's voice, from somewhere behind you, the usual precision of it softened at the edges. "We should—I believe we should—"

"Which way," someone said.

"The path," Thorin said, and his voice was the clearest thing in the forest, the consonants still landing where they were supposed to, though the sentences were coming slightly further apart than usual. "We stay on the—"

"Which path ?" Dwalin replied.

The subsequent conversation happened around you and through you and mostly without your participation, because you were looking at the trees on the left side of the path with the patient, slow attention of someone trying to establish whether they were the same trees you'd been looking at ten minutes ago or different trees, and the trees were not offering a clear answer on this.

"We're going in circles," Nori said, flatly.

"We're not—"

"We are too," Nori said.

Balin was beside you still, his hand on your arm with the steady, warm pressure of someone keeping a tether. "It's alright," he said, the words arrived clearly but from a slight distance. "Just keep walking lassie."

"I'm—" you started, and the end of the sentence didn't arrive. You had started it and it had been a complete thought and then it wasn't, and you looked at Balin's hand on your arm and thought very carefully about what you'd been going to say, and couldn't find it.

You kept moving. Or you started to. And then — time did something, or you did something to time, the step you took blurred at the edges and the blink you took to reset your vision was very long, and on the other side of the blink the company was still walking and you were walking with them, and then another long blink, and then—

You'd blinked a perfectly normal blink. The kind of blink that happened between one second and the next without requiring any management.

But the light was different. The quality of it—darker, greener, the particular green-black of night in a forest without stars—was not the light that had been there when you'd blinked in.

You blinked again, something was wrong with— your —with.

The wrongness arrived before the understanding of it—a specific wrongness of restricted movement, of trying to reach forward and finding that the effort produced nothing, the arms not responding with the clean, immediate translation of intention to motion that you'd been operating with.

You were lying down—why where you lying down ?

You were lying down and your arms were—there was something on them, over them—and your legs—and your—you were covered in webs.

This arrived all at once and too fast, it took everything you had not to make a sound, because sounds were information and information was currently a resource you were very short of. You were lying on your side, webbed, in the dark, and you were moving—not walking, being dragged, the ground underneath you shifting in the jolting, irregular way of something being pulled over uneven terrain, and the something being pulled was you.

Somewhere behind you, not far, there were other shapes. Bundled, irregular, the size and shape of—dwarves. Wrapped in the same stuff, the same yellow-grey webbing, lying on the ground in a row that was being systematically reduced as something moved methodically along it.

The company. That was the company. They were in those bundles.

The thing pulling you was enormous, you saw it when it passed through a gap in the canopy where a fragment of moonlight came through—eight legs, each section of leg longer than you were tall, moving with the horrible fluid efficiency of something built for exactly this, the body overhead massive and dark and moving with a certainty that made your stomach drop so far you lost track of where it went.

You moved your hands, carefully. Very carefully. The webbing was thick but it wasn't, you found, rigid — it gave under pressure, the way something does when it's strong but not inflexible, your hands were small next to it, your wrists were smaller still and the thing pulling you from your feet was not paying attention to your hands, as you worked them. One against the other, the friction and the slow, patient rotation of your wrists, pressing into the web and pulling back, feeling for the places where it gave more than others.

Your right hand came free, the relief of it was so intense it was almost physical, a loosening in your chest that made your next breath come in faster than you intended, and you pressed your free hand flat to the webbing and used it to lever the other free, and then you had both hands and the thing's attention was still forward, still pulling, and you reached down and found the edge of the webbing at your legs and started working at it.

You did not think about what you were doing. Thought was slow and thinking about it would make it slower. You rolled sideways, to your back, got your feet under you, stayed low, and moved.

Screaming started from somewhere to your left, not far—the sounds of dwarves coming out of something confused and finding themselves in circumstances considerably worse than confused. A fight, several fights perhaps, the specific chaotic volume of the company in a situation.

A spider came for you from the right. They were spiders, you could see that now, the leg that had come across your field of vision when you'd managed to tilt your head was a spider's leg and the spider was the size of a truck.

It was fast—the legs moving in the horrible fluid pattern of something with too many joints in the wrong places, covering ground in a way your brain kept refusing to track properly because the movement pattern didn't fit any template you had for large things moving quickly.

You reached into your pocket, fumbling with Ori's sprase spare piece of charcoal, before reaching deeper.

The oil. Your oil was there, it was always there, you'd checked every morning and your fingers found it and you got the cork out and got a quantity of it onto your fingers and the cork back in in the frantic, adrenaline-fast sequence of someone doing something they'd practiced but never done under conditions like this.

The spider reached you, you got your hand up and snapped and the flame came off your fingers in the arc Elrond had described it landed and the spider's front legs reared back, it made a sound that had no equivalent in anything you'd ever heard, a sound that bypassed the reasoning parts of your brain entirely and landed somewhere more fundamental, you stepped back hard and nearly went over a root and caught yourself.

The spider recovered faster than you, its leg came around in a sweep that you were too slow to entirely avoid—you went left and it caught the right, a line of fire across your shoulder that was not the fire you'd been making, a different kind, the specific burning of a cut from something sharp, and you went down on one knee from the force of it.

The spider was over you before you'd gotten back up, you snapped again—the motion not quite right, the angle wrong, the flame producing but not throwing, burning in your palm, and you were holding fire in your hand and not accomplishing anything useful with it and the spider was very close and very large and you were on one knee with your shoulder against a tree root.

Something hit the spider from the left at speed—the spider moving sideways with the force of it, several of its legs losing their placement, Kíli was there, his blade in his hand, the specific focused expression he had when he was fighting, and you had never been more relieved to see another person in your life.

"You found me," you said, getting your feet under you, and your voice came out slightly higher than you'd care to admit.

"I was looking," Kíli said, ducking under a leg sweep with the economical movement of someone who had been doing this for the better part of his life. "You're hard to find in the dark." He drove the blade in and the spider recoiled. "Can you run?"

"Yes," you said.

"Then run. I'm right behind you."

You moved as fast as the terrain, your shoulder and the dark allowed, which was not running in any clean sense but was faster than standing still, Kíli was behind you and making enough noise that you could track him by sound, the sounds of him fighting and moving and occasionally saying things in Khuzdul that were definitively not, from their tone, polite.

"Left," he said, from behind you. "There's another one on the left."

You turned.

"Not that way—LEFT!"

You course corrected, dodging the tree that had materialised in your path, a spider to the left swept past in your peripheral vision and Kíli's blade was there to meet it and you kept moving.

"You're doing great," Kíli said, from somewhere in the dark behind you. His voice held the particular lightness, the specific Kíli quality of keeping things from becoming their worst possible version. "Honestly, impressive. The fire thing was—"

"A disaster," you said, between breaths.

"A creative disaster," he said. "Very innovative." A sound of impact. "Keep going."

"I cannot fight like you," you said.

"You're fighting fine—"

"I'm running," you said.

"Running is a time-honoured combat strategy," Kíli said, entirely seriously. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

A spider came from above—you didn't see it until you walked through the first trailing thread of web and then looked up and the body of it was overhead, the legs were coming down and you snapped your fingers without thinking, the wrong angle again, the flame in your palm, and you threw your hand upward more by instinct than technique the flame went—somewhere, not on the spider, but near enough that the legs recoiled upward and Kíli's blade was there and the spider retreated.

"Better," Kíli said.

"That was an accident"

"Accidents count," he said. "We have to find the others" He was scanning the dark now, the fighting-sharpened attention spreading outward, looking for the sounds of the rest of the company.

You stopped. Listened.

You could hear fighting, somewhere ahead and to the right—the sounds of it, blades, spider-sounds and voices. Thorin's voice, Balin's voice, Fíli's voice—your shared look even in the dim light showed the relief on both Kíli and your own face.

Then the company went quiet, not gradually. All at once, the way sound goes when the thing making it stops rather than the way it goes when it moves away, the silence that came in to replace it had a quality that your body responded to before your brain did, the sudden terrible stillness of a forest that had been loud and then was not.

You and Kíli stared at each other in the dark, then without concious decision you both ran toward the silence.

The arrows came from every direction and from nowhere visible, which was the most frightening thing about them—not the sight of them but the sound, the specific whisper-hiss of something moving fast through air, then the thud of them finding wood, and then more, surrounding you, and more, you stopped because stopping was the only instinct available when an unknown number of arrows had just appeared in the trees at exactly the height of your heads.

Kíli stopped before you, his hand stretched across you in an attempt to keep you from moving forward, from your position at his back.

Elves stepped out of the dark, they were tall—the height of them visible even in the dark, the particular lean, upright height of something built without excess, they had arrows nocked, drawn and pointed at you with the composed, unhurried certainty of people who could hold a bowstring under tension for far longer than you wanted to test.

Their eyes, in the dark, were the kind of clear that didn't quite make sense.

"Who are you?" The voice was flat and precise, carrying the specific quality of a accent that had been shaped over a very long time by people who considered precision a courtesy. The Elvish accent was different from Lindir's, different from Elrond's—harder at the edges, less smoothed. "What business have you in Mirkwood?"

You looked at the arrows. At the Elves. Back at the arrows.

"We're—we're not spiders," you said and your voice came out smaller than you'd intended. "We're not — we're not here to cause trouble, I promise, we were on a path and then we weren't and then—"

"You are of the race of men," One Elf said with a specific flatness that communicated a complete sentence's worth of opinion in seven words. "Yet you travel in the company of dwarves."

"Y-yes," you said. "They're my—My—" The word stuck for a second. "My friends."

The Elves looked at Kíli. Kíli looked at the Elves with the specific defiance of a dwarf who was not going to show the Elves that he was breathing slightly harder than usual from the fighting and was not quite succeeding.

Beyond them, through the trees, you could see the company. The company was surrounded, ringed, with more arrows trained on them, their weapons taken or in the process of being taken, and Thorin's face among them was the face of a man in a situation he'd assessed and found no current solution to.

The Elf at your left said something, in a liquid, fluid language, assuming neither of you would understand, which was a correct assumption.

"Elvish," Kíli said, under his breath, in a tone that was of no relief upon hearing it.

You looked at the arrowhead. Very close. Very precise.

One fo the other elves answered the speaker, also in Elvish, and the particular quality of the observation—the note in it, the thing that sat underneath the word—made you want to take a step back.

Through the trees ahead, you could see a clearing— or the edge of one, the tree density thinning enough to let in a fraction more of what passed for light in Mirkwood—in that clearing, arranged in the specific configuration of people who were still being disarmed and are being held at arrowpoint, you could see the rest of the company.

Balin, a step back from Thorin and to the right, with his hands at his sides and the expression of a man who was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing what it cost him to stand like that.

Fíli. The others.

"Kíli," you said, very quietly.

"I see them," he said. The lightness had gone from his voice now—not because he'd decided the situation was frightening, but because the situation had become specific enough to require a different register. He looked at the arrows pointed at you and at the company in the clearing, and his jaw set. "I see them."

The Elf with the first arrow took a step toward you.

"Come," the elf said as he guided you by the upper arm. Not kindly. With the specific, neutral authority of someone who had decided what was going to happen and was informing you rather than asking.

"Our host," he said, surveying the assembled and somewhat bleary company—those who were upright, anyway, Bombur having achieved a seated position that implied neither sleep nor full wakefulness, Kíli leaning against Fíli with his eyes mostly open—"Is in the yard presently."

"Is he big?" said Kíli.

"He is large," Gandalf said. "Very large."

"How large is very large?" said Kíli.

"Large enough that I would ask you not to stare," Gandalf said, with the pointed emphasis of someone who had already decided that asking Kíli not to stare was probably optimistic. "You will have noted the scale of this house, and the—proportions of the furniture."

The company had noted in the wordless collective way of a group that had shared an experience and assigned it to the same internal category without discussing it.

"He is not," Gandalf continued, "fond of dwarves."

A silence.

"How not fond?" Dwalin said.

"Significantly," Gandalf said. "Which is why we will approach him carefully. We will—introduce the company gradually. A few at a time." He glanced around the group. "Only come out in pairs. And only when I give the signal." He looked at the company. Then at Bilbo. Then at you. "Bilbo. And—you dear lady. You'll both come with me."

Bilbo straightened with the expression of a hobbit who had been told he'd been voluntold for something and was going to be mature about it.

"Why us?" Bilbo asked.

"Because," Gandalf said, "he is not overly fond of dwarves. He has no particular position on hobbits or—" He picked up his staff from where it had been leaning against the wall with a vauge gesture to you. "Our young lady here—are less likely to produce the immediate negative response that thirteen dwarves arriving collectively would produce."

"That's—that is—practical" you blinked.

The yard outside was wide and open, the morning light falling across it in clear sheets, the grass still holding the silver of dew, the animals moving through it with the same domestic composure they'd shown the night before. The bees were already busy. Two enormous Ponies stood at the fence and watched your approach with the patient, knowing attention of animals that had been here longer than most things.

Beorn was chopping wood.

You processed this piece of information in the same way you'd processed the Wargs and the trolls and the Great Goblin—in stages, beginning with the size. The axe he was using was not an axe you could have lifted with both hands. The wood he was splitting was not wood you would have had any idea how to approach. The man himself—

The man. You kept the word man in play because it was the available word, the word that corresponded to the general shape of things, even though the application of it required some adjustments. He was taller than Gandalf. You registered this because Gandalf was the tallest person in your immediate experience of this world, outside of elves, they both served as a baseline against which everything above-average-height was measured and Beorn exceeded it considerably. His arms, swinging the axe with the loose, rhythmic ease of someone for whom this effort was roughly equivalent to stirring a cup of tea, were the kind of arms that made you quietly reconsider what the word arm could mean.

You and Bilbo had fallen half a step behind Gandalf. You were not proud of this. You were also not in the mood to attempt changing it.

"Good morning!" Gandalf called, from what you would later call a strategic distance.

Beorn stopped. The axe came to rest. He straightened to his full, considerable height and turned, and the face that turned toward you had spent a great deal of time outdoors over a very long period of time, deeply lined, dark-eyed, with a beard and hair that had organised themselves without much outside intervention.

He looked at Gandalf. Then at Bilbo. Then at you.

You smiled and waved faintly. The smile of a person covering their instincts with social convention, the wave of someone unsure if there name was the one called, stuttered and awkward.

"I'm Gandalf," Gandalf said.

"I know who you are." Beorn's voice was deep in the way of things that generated their sound from somewhere considerably below the chest, and the words had a quality of weight to them that was not quite an accent and not quite a pace but was both of those things together. He set the axe down against the block and turned, he looked at Bilbo. "Who is this little fellow?"

"This would be Mr. Baggins," Gandalf said. "He is a hobbit."

Beorn looked at Bilbo with the interested, direct attention of someone examining something they hadn't encountered before. "A halfling." He bent, slightly, which was still considerable. Bilbo held his ground with the particular dignity of a hobbit who had survived enough by this point to have developed a very good poker face.

"And what is she?" You became aware that this question was directed at you.

"She is our companion," Gandalf said.

"I asked what she is," Beorn said, still looking at you. His gaze had the quality of something assessing rather than threatening, the specific focus of a creature who was used to reading the nature of things and found you a less-than-straightforward example.

"I'm—" you started. "I'm just—a person—a human. From very far away." You paused. "Very, very far away."

Beorn looked at you for another moment. Then at Gandalf. "Hmm," he said, which seemed to function as an adequate response, and stood back.

It was at this precise moment that Dwalin and Balin appeared in the doorway.

Gandalf's expression did not dramatically change, but something in the quality of his composure shifted in the particular way of a man who was not surprised by something and wished he were.

"Ah," he said. "And these are two of our companions. Dwalin. And Balin." He gestured, with the resigned elegance of a man making the best of the hand he'd been dealt. "At your service."

Beorn looked at the two dwarves. Then at Gandalf. "You said you were three."

"I did," Gandalf agreed. "Three."

"You brought two dwarves," Beorn said, with the flat, specific tone of a man checking arithmetic.

"I—" Gandalf glanced at Dwalin and Balin with the expression of a man recalibrating in real time. "Well. I may have—slightly understated the situation."

"Do you call three," Beorn said, indicating the dwarves, "a group?"

"Well. When you put it that way—"

Another pair appeared in the doorway. Fíli and Kíli, arriving in the specific, immediate, energetic way of Fíli and Kíli appearing anywhere, and the fact that they'd clearly been told to wait for a signal and had apparently received an extremely different interpretation of what that signal was was visible in the slight sheepish quality of the pause at the threshold.

Beorn looked at them. Looked at Gandalf. Looked at the original number—three—that was now, very clearly, not three.

"And who are these?" he said.

"These are—yes," Gandalf said. "They are Fíli and Kíli. Also our companions. I should perhaps have mentioned—the group is somewhat larger than I initially—"

More dwarves in the doorway. Dori and Ori, then Nori, appearing with the same universal quality of people who had been told to wait for a signal and had decided, independently or collectively, that something they'd seen from inside the house probably qualified as one.

"Dori and Ori," Gandalf said, pushing through the rising tide of his own miscalculation with the magnificent composure of a wizard who had been in worse situations and intended to keep that framing at the forefront of his mind.

"And Nori. Yes." He smiled at Beorn. "You see there were—several. More than—the fact is—"

"How many?" Beorn said. He had crossed his arms. This produced an effect.

"Thirteen," Gandalf said. He had the particular tone of a man saying a number that has more digits than he'd prefer it to have. "In total. Including myself and Mr. Baggins, fifteen. And—" he glanced at you, "—sixteen."

The silence that followed was the silence of a very large man looking at a growing line of dwarves filing out of his house with the expression of someone reassessing a series of decisions that had culminated in this.

"Stupid thing to do," he said, which was directed at Gandalf but encompassed the entire enterprise, "coming to my house with a company of thirteen dwarves and not saying so."

"You are absolutely right," Gandalf said, with the serene, unruffled acknowledgement of a man who had no intention of apologising but was prepared to agree that one might. "It was perhaps—poorly introduced."

Beorn's gaze moved across the assembled company, which had now achieved its full complement on the grass outside, all of them doing their level best to look unalarming, with varying degrees of success. Bombur had ended up at the front of the group and was possibly not helping the cause of presenting the company as a lean, unimposing travelling party.

His gaze arrived at Thorin and Beorn looked at him for a long moment. Then looked away, back toward the house, and the matter of the company's size appeared to settle into the category of things that had already happened and could not be changed.

"Come inside," he said. "Then."

You caught Bilbo's eye. He caught yours. Neither of you said anything, and both of you thought a great deal.

Breakfast, at Beorn's table, was an occasion of scale. The bread came in loaves you could have used as structural elements. The honey arrived in pots of a size that Bombur regarded with the almost worshipful reverence of a dwarf who had just confirmed his belief that some places were fundamentally better than others. The cream was cold and deep in its bowl and had the quality of something that had been produced by animals who had never known anxiety, which, looking around the yard, seemed entirely plausible.

The company ate. This was not a surprise. What was a surprise—or perhaps not, given recent evidence— was how quickly the scale of the breakfast achieved something like comfortable normalcy, the dwarves redistributing themselves around the enormous table with the adaptive ease of people who had slept in goblin tunnels and emerged from mountain passes and for whom sitting at an overlarge table was honestly quite manageable by comparison.

Beorn ate too, at the head of the table, with the unhurried economy of someone for whom food was provision rather than occasion. He talked as he ate, in a direct, unadorned manner you'd noted from outside—no social scaffolding, no rhetorical setup, just the words themselves.

"These lands are crawling with orcs," he said, and the table went quiet with the specific attention that had become the company's default response to threat-relevant information. "Their numbers are growing." He looked at the company, at Thorin. "And you are on foot. You will never reach the forest alive. Not through open country." He paused. "I chased you through the night. And I am one thing not many."

"We are aware of that, yes," Gandalf said.

"You run fast for a company this size," Beorn said, with what you thought might be the closest he came to a compliment, which landed with a weight that suggested it was the closest he came to a compliment.

A mouse came from somewhere—a gap in the wall, the edge of the table, somewhere along the route of a mouse who lived in this house and had made its peace with the various enormous things that also lived in it. It appeared on Bofur's arm, which was resting on the table edge, and Bofur, deep in conversation with Óin on his other side, didn't notice it immediately and without interrupting the conversation made the automatic, slightly distracted motion of a person removing something from their arm that hadn't been invited there.

The mouse went sideways. Off the arm, toward the edge of the table.

You caught it.

It was reflex, completely—your hand moving before your brain had done anything, cupped to intercept the small, startled creature before it completed its trajectory toward the floor. You sat there with a mouse in your palms, and looked at it, and it looked at you with the wide, clear-eyed alarm of something that had been having quite a morning already.

"Hello there," you said.

It didn't immediately flee, which you chose to interpret as a good sign. You opened your hands slightly, giving it room without releasing it, and ran one finger very lightly along its back, the way you'd done with Sebastian, and something in the set of its small shoulders shifted from alarm toward a more provisional arrangement.

"Bofur,"

"Mm?" He turned.

"That was rude," you told him.

"I barely—"

"It was rude," you said, with the gentle, certainty of a person who had strong opinions about this and was not going to be talked out of them. You looked at the mouse. "You frightened them."

"I—" He looked around at the table, at several of the company who had tuned in to this exchange. "That's—the mouse appeared on my arm."

"And you startled them," you said. "You have to be— they're small, Bofur, they startle easily—"

"I barely touched it—"

"You flicked it—"

"I moved it aside, there's a difference—"

You looked at the mouse in your palms, who was now sitting with the composed, bright-eyed attention of a creature that had made an assessment and decided the current arrangement was acceptable. "You're alright, little guy" you told them, which was directed at the mouse and not at Bofur, which Bofur noticed.

"Am I being asked to apologise to a mouse?," Bofur said, with the affectionate, slightly aggrieved tone of a dwarf.

"They live here," you said. "You're a guest."

Across the table, Beorn had been watching this. His expression had the quality of someone reassessing something.

He reached over—a long reach, scaled to the reach of someone built to these proportions and held out one enormous hand, flat, palm up, near yours. An offer.

You looked at the hand. At the mouse. Transferred the small creature, carefully, into the cup of his enormous palm, where it sat and looked around with the same composure it had shown in yours, and Beorn looked at it with an expression that was the quietest, most private version of expression you'd been watching on Balin for months.

He carried the mouse to a small shelf near the wall, set it down, and came back to the table.

"I don't like dwarves," he said, without particular hostility—more as a stated position, a documented preference. "They're greedy and blind. Blind to the lives of those they deem lesser than their own." He paused, and the pause had the quality of a man considering the actions present in his home. "But orcs I hate more." He looked at Thorin. "What do you need?"

Thorin, who had received the assessment of his people with the contained stillness of a man who was not going to argue with a being this size on philosophical grounds replied. "Ponies. To reach the forest."

"Ponies," Beorn said. "You'll have ponies. Good ones." He stood from the table with the movement of something that had decided the matter was closed. "You leave at first light."

And that, in the way of most things Beorn said, was the end of it.

The afternoon had settled into the comfortable looseness of a day that had been accounted for— everyone knowing they were leaving at first light, nobody needing to do anything particular in the hours between, the company distributing itself through the cottage and yard with the happy, scattered freedom of people who'd been given unscheduled time and had all made different decisions about what to do with it.

You found Beorn at the far edge of the yard.

He was doing something to the fence—a repair, or an adjustment, the kind of task that looked small from a distance and resolved into considerable complexity up close. You came to stand nearby, which he acknowledged without looking up, the awareness of another presence registered and filed without requiring comment.

"May I ask—what is it like?" you said, after a while.

He looked at you.

"Being a skin-changer," you said. "Being—both man and bear both of those things at once. Or—not at once, but—you know what I mean."

He was quiet for a moment, the length of a man deciding whether this was a question he was going to answer. "You ask strange questions," he said.

"I've been told that," you agreed, rocking back on your heels. "Quite a bit actually."

He returned to the fence. "It is not both things at once. It is one thing and then another. The shape changes. The—what is inside does not." He set down whatever tool he was using and considered the fence. "The bear knows what the man knows. The man knows what the bear has seen." He paused. "It is not comfortable, always. But it is what I am."

"Does it get easier?" you said. "Being—being the thing you don't always choose to be?"

He looked at you again, and the look this time had a different quality—the assessment of a creature that was used to reading things that didn't say what they meant directly.

"You learn to live inside with what you have," he said, eventually. "Not because the other is gone. But because the one you are in is the one that is real, right now." He picked up his tool. "That is the only answer there is, for most things."

You looked at the fence, at the enormous, capable hands working on it, at the yard behind you where the company was variously occupying itself, and thought that this was probably the most useful piece of advice you'd received in some time.

Thorin was standing against the doorway with his arms crossed and his expression doing something he hadn't assigned a category to yet, his eyes on you and Beorn with a quality that was not the flat, kingly attention he brought to most things but something slightly different—tighter, more contained, the specific quality of someone performing neutrality rather than actually feeling it.

Dwalin materialised at Thorin's shoulder with the directness that was Dwalin's primary social mode. He looked at Thorin. Then at you. Then back at Thorin, with the expression of a man who had served his king for a very long time and had developed a very accurate internal read of him.

"You're looking at him," Dwalin said, "like you intend to kill him."

"I'm watching the perimeter," Thorin said, flatly.

"You're watching the lass," Dwalin said, with the blunt, affectionate lack of ceremony that only Dwalin could direct at Thorin and survive.

"I said I'm watching the perimeter."

Dwalin looked at the perimeter. Then at you, Beorn. Then back at Thorin. "Mmm," he said, which somehow managed to contain the equivalent of a very detailed paragraph. Thorin didn't say anything, but turned his head very slowly to perice Dwalin with a gaze he was not often the receiver of.

"Right," Dwalin said. He uncrossed his arms and recrossed them. "Only asking."

"You weren't asking," Thorin said.

"No," Dwalin agreed. He looked one more time in your direction, at the easy conversation by the fence, at the fact that Beorn had said more words to you in the last ten minutes than he'd voluntarily said to any dwarf in the entirety of their acquaintance. "No, I wasn't."

He walked away with the satisfied economy of a man who had said everything he'd come to say.

That evening the company organised itself for sleep in the main hall with the familiar efficiency of people who had done this enough times to have developed strong opinions about bedroll placement.

You made your way through the arranged shapes of sleeping dwarves—some already asleep, some still talking, Ori with his book, Bofur with his flute but playing nothing, just holding it and caught Thorin's eye as you passed the space where he'd settled himself with his pipe, the bowl of it glowing faintly orange in the dimness.

You smiled at him. Small, honest, the smile of someone who saw the person behind the thing they were managing and wasn't going to make a production of it.

He looked at you for a moment, and something in his face loosened, fractionally, and he nodded once—the nod that was more than a nod, the version of it that he used when the thing he was acknowledging was something he couldn't otherwise acknowledge in company.

You found your place beside Balin, who had the ledger open but had stopped writing and was watching the fire with the contemplative air of a dwarf at the end of a long day that had contained more Beorn than anticipated. You settled beside him, helped him close the ledger, and didn't say anything, and he didn't say anything, and the fire did the rest.

The hall was deep in sleep when you woke, with no particular reason—nothing alarming, no sound from outside, just the inexplicable middle-of-the-night consciousness that arrived sometimes for no reason and with no intention of leaving quickly. You lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling, listening to Dwalin's snoring and the steady breath of fifteen other people and the fire, which had burned down to a deep, quiet red.

You lay on your back and looked at the rafters of Beorn's cottage and did the thing you'd been doing since the goblin caves, which was going back through the sequence of events with the specific, involuntary thoroughness of a brain that had not finished processing and had decided the middle of the night was the right time to work through the backlog. The tunnels. The sound of things in the dark. The weight of the company running around you. The feeling of coming out into sunlight and finding your hand bleeding and not knowing when it had started.

You rolled onto your side. Pulled the blanket up. Looked at the dim shape of the interior in the dark, the single candle burning in a holder on a rough shelf across the way, the shapes of sleeping dwarves in various attitudes of unconsciousness.

Thorin was sitting against the far wall, in that pool of candlelight, with his back straight and his legs crossed and something in his hands. You lay and watched him for a moment before your eyes adjusted enough to make out what he was doing.

One of the braids near his face—the thin ones that hung loose on either side, the ones you'd noticed from the beginning without ever thinking much about them—was unravelled, the dark hair loose and slightly crimped where the plait had been, and he was working at it with the focused, practiced care of someone doing something that required attention.

His fingers moved through the strands with a methodical patience, separating, smoothing, working out something near the end of the length, and the silver bead that usually sat at the bottom of that braid was resting on the straw beside him, catching the candlelight in small, warm glints.

You watched him for a minute without moving or speaking, which you'd have felt stranger about if he hadn't looked so entirely unselfconscious about it—not performing solitude, not projecting do not approach, just doing a thing that needed doing with the quiet focus of someone who did this when they needed to and wasn't concerned about an audience.

You sat up. He didn't look over, but the quality of his stillness changed slightly, which meant he'd heard you.

You moved across the barn toward him, stepping around Bofur's outstretched legs, avoiding the end of Nori's blanket, arriving at the edge of the candlelight and sitting down in it with your legs crossed, mirroring his position without planning to.

In the warmer light, you could see what was near him. Both beads—there were two of them, you realised now, one for each braid, and in the candlelight the markings on them were visible, small and precise, a pattern worked into the metal that had a deliberateness about it that spoke of meaning rather than decoration.

You picked one up.

He watched you do it from the side of his eyes and didn't object.

The bead was heavier than it looked—solid silver, real silver, not plated, with the particular weight of quality. The markings ran around it in a band a pattern of lines and shapes that had structure, a grammar you couldn't read but could recognise as having one.

"What do they mean?" you asked, keeping your voice low enough not to carry.

Thorin looked at the bead in your fingers for a moment. "The bottom line is the line of Durin," he said, and his voice was at the same register as yours —not a whisper exactly, but calibrated for the space between two people rather than a room. "The pattern is a record. Lineage, on this face." His finger, without quite touching the bead, indicated the section. "And here—the founding of Erebor. The symbols of Durin's craft."

You turned the bead carefully, looking at the different sections he indicated, and thought about how much had been compressed into something small enough to sit at the end of a braid. History made portable. Memory you could carry in your hair.

"They're beautiful," you said.

"They're old," he said. "My grandfather's, long before they became mine."

You set the bead down gently on the straw between you, with the care you gave things that were old and had carried several lives before arriving at this one, and looked at the loose hair in his hands. He'd gotten most of it undone—the length of it, separated from the braid, was longer than you'd thought and he was working at a small tangle near the end with the methodical patience of someone who had done this many times and knew that patience was the only approach.

"Braids mean things," you said. Not a question, working it out as you said it. "Not just yours. But all of them generally speaking. Don't they?"

He looked at you. Something in the look registered that you'd been paying attention, which was the kind of thing Thorin noticed and rarely commented on directly. "Yes," he said. "Achievement, among our people, is worn. A battle survived, a craft mastered, a rank held—there are braids for all of it. And beads that mark the lineage of the one wearing them." He paused. "Our beards as well, though that is more complex."

"And the specific ones—these ones," you said, gesturing at the braids beside his face. "Are those different from the others?"

He was quiet for a moment. His fingers worked at the tangle, gently, unhurried. "Some braids are given," he said, carefully, "rather than earned. By specific people, in specific contexts." He didn't elaborate further, and the careful quality of the not-elaborating suggested there was more there that he wasn't going to say tonight, and you filed it away with the other things you were used to filing now.

He reached the second braid—the matching one on the other side, which he'd been leaving for last and began the process of unwinding it, approximately halfway through the unwinding he ran into a tangle that was considerably more stubborn than the first one, and made a small sound that was specifically not a curse but was adjacent to one, and you looked at his expression and laughed.

A quiet laugh, muffled in deference to the sleeping company, but genuine—the laugh of someone caught off guard by something endearing in a context where endearing was not the expected register.

He looked at you with the expression he used when he was pretending something wasn't funny, which you'd learned to distinguish from the expression he used when something actually wasn't funny, mainly because one of them involved a slight tension at the corner of his mouth that the other didn't.

"Do you want me to—"

"No," he said.

"It's just that you've been at that particular section for a while."

"I'm aware," he said.

"Its just, I can see from here that the—"

"Fine, if you would like to be useful," Thorin said, with the precise dignity of a man conceding a point without calling it a concession, "you may."

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

You moved closer—shifting on the straw until the distance between you was working distance, the kind of distance at which hands could reach without stretching. The candlelight from the shelf above put you both in the same warm circle of light, and you reached across Thorin tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement, and your fingers found the tangle in his unbound hair.

It was—softer than you'd expected, though you hadn't thought about Thorin's hair enough to have an expectation for it. Clean, still, despite the goblin tunnels and the running and everything that had come before—he'd clearly bathed and the dark strands ran through your fingers with a smoothness that made the tangle more obvious by contrast, a small, tight knot near the end where the braid had been fixed and the binding had worked itself into the hair.

You worked at it the way you worked at things that required patience—carefully, without pulling, finding the individual threads of the knot and encouraging them apart rather than forcing them.

He went still, in the way he went still when he was paying attention to something. Not tense—just present. His hands had lowered to his knees, the work of smoothing the first section already done, and he sat with the candlelight on his face and talked, keeping his voice low.

"When I was young," he said, "my mother braided my hair herself. Every morning. She was particular about it." A pause in which you felt, rather than saw, a small and private quality of memory. "She said that a dwarf's braid told his story before he opened his mouth, and that a poorly kept braid told it badly, and that she would not have her son tell his story badly."

"Sounds like she was formidable," you said, gently separating another thread from the knot.

"She was," he said. "In every way."

You worked in quiet for a moment. The tangle was loosening—gradually, one layer at a time.

"My mother couldn't braid," you said, because the silence had the quality of something that could hold exchange as well as simply rest. "She tried, when I was small. It always came out—sort of sideways. There's a photograph somewhere—"

You stopped, because photograph was the wrong word and you were about to trip over the explanation, and instead said "A picture. Of me at about six years old with the most chaotic plait you have ever seen. She was so pleased with herself."

The thread you were following—came loose after a moment. "She sounds kind," he said.

"She was," you said. "She is." You pressed your lips together briefly, looking at the work in your hands. "She is," you said again, the present tense landing deliberately.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

The tangle came free. You felt it give, the hair running smooth again under your fingers, and you separated the section carefully and looked at the length of it—unbraided, loose, falling over your hand in the candlelight.

"Right," you said. "So now you can just—"

"Three sections," he said, and his voice was close, because he had turned his head slightly to speak to you and the turning had reduced the distance between you, and the candlelight did things to the planes of his face from this angle that you noticed and then looked back at the hair in your hands. "Over, under, over. Keep the tension even."

"Are you sure you want me to—"

"A Lady who finds herself in the company of dwarves, may find herself with reasons to braid." Thorin stated, almost softly, with an expression you could not read by the warmth of candlelight.

You divided the section into three with careful fingers. Started the plait. It went wrong almost immediately—one strand crossing in the wrong direction, the whole thing losing its coherence after five moves, the tension uneven in exactly the way he'd said not to let it be.

"Over, under," he said again, patient, watching you attentively.

"I am going over, under—"

"Your left hand isn't holding tension. You're letting the outside strand go slack every second move."

"I am not—" you started, and looked at your hands, and were going slack every second move, and pressed your lips together. "Fine," you said. "Fine, yes, okay." Adjusted. Tried again.

It went better. Not perfectly, but better—the plait forming with a coherence that was at least recognisable as intentional, the three strands staying in their relationship with each other instead of migrating.

You reached the end and stopped, because the end was where the bead went, and the bead was on the straw, and threading the fine end of a plait through a small silver bead in candlelight was a different order of task from the plaiting itself.

You picked up the bead. Held it between your fingers. Looked at the small opening of it, and at the end of the plait, and at the gap between the two. Tried once—the end of the braid fraying slightly, then completely while refusing to cooperate.

"You're trying to push it," Thorin said.

"I'm aware of that, yes."

"Hold the braid tight and bring the bead onto it rather than pushing through. The hair stays, the bead moves, not the other way."

You tried. The bead slid a little and caught.

Tried again. "It's—I can't get the angle—"

His hands came up beside yours, and two fingers took the bead from you with the particular assurance of someone who had done this specific thing many, many times, and in three moves that you watched with a focus that made you feel slightly as if you were studying for an exam, the bead was threaded, and sitting at the end of the braid, and the plait was done.

"Oh," you said.

He lowered his hands. Looked at the finished braid, checking it with the brief critical attention of someone who had standards ingrained.

"The tension's a little uneven in the middle section," he said.

"You're welcome," you said.

The corner of his mouth tweaked upward in a quick pull, before he schooled it. "Yes," he said. "I—Thank you."

He straightened, settling back against the wall, the braid finished, the bead in place, and picked up the second bead from the straw—turned it in his fingers, and looked at it, and then looked at you.

"Would you like one?" he said.

The question arrived without quite announcing itself, and you blinked—the specific blink of someone who heard something and needed a moment to confirm what they'd heard.

"I—" You looked at the bead in his hand. At him. "I haven't done anything to earn one," you said. "That's—you said they're earned, or given for specific things, and I haven't—done anything specifically."

Thorin looked at you, steady and direct, the candlelight warm on his face, and the expression in it was—the quality of something kept carefully below the surface and held there with considerable effort. His fingers turned the bead once more, and then stilled.

"You may yet," he said.

Three words. Quiet, in the low register he used when he meant things without wanting to account for them, and he held your gaze for one more moment—one moment in which you were aware of exactly how close you were, of the candlelight, of the sleeping company around you, of the silver bead in his hand catching the light in small, warm points— and then looked away, his eyes going to the rafters above, and the moment settled into the straw between you and neither of you named it.

"You should sleep," he said. Still quiet.

"So should you," you said.

Gandalf, for his part, had been looking at the treeline to the east with the focused, private expression he wore when he was doing calculations he wasn't going to share the working of.

"I know of a place. Not far. It will serve as shelter." He paused, with the quality of a man who is considering whether to include the next piece of information and deciding, pragmatically, that he has to. "Our host may not welcome visitors, but I know his ways. Follow me, and stay close."

"Our host?" Dwalin said, with the flat, pointed delivery of a dwarf identifying something that required unpacking.

"Yes," Gandalf said, and walked east, and the company followed, because with Gandalf there was always the choice between following and finding out the hard way why you should have followed, the company had been acquainted with the wizard long enough to have a strong collective preference.

You fell into step between Bofur and Bilbo. "What kind of host is a host who might not welcome visitors?" you said, keeping your voice low.

"Someone who lives alone for good reasons," Bofur said, with the calm of a man making peace with a situation in real time.

"That's not—" you started.

"No," Bofur agreed. "It isn't, no."

You looked at the treeline Gandalf was moving toward. At the east, where whatever Bilbo had seen was, presumably, still being large and moving. At Gandalf's back, the hurried pace of him that somehow always stayed ahead of the people moving at full speed behind him.

You moved faster. Kept up. Didn't say the things you were thinking, because the things you were thinking weren't useful and the running was about to start and you needed your breath for the running.

It had a different quality from the goblin tunnels—less enclosed, less dark, more open terror, the kind that comes with having a clear line of sight to the thing behind you and being able to make an accurate assessment of how fast it was moving and how fast you were moving and what the differential between these two facts was. The shape that came through the trees behind you was—large, in the way Bilbo had meant, in the way that the word large stopped being adequate description and started being simple understatement, and it moved with a speed and a purpose that made the base of your spine go very cold.

The cottage appeared from nowhere—from behind a screen of tall trees that the path broke through so suddenly that the transition from forest to open ground and then the sight of the building happened almost simultaneously. It was enormous. Not Rivendell-enormous, not the architectural grandeur of stone towers and carved arches—enormous in the way of something built for a person who might possibly be a different size, the doorframe taller than any door you'd seen in this world, the proportions of everything slightly too large, the effect slightly vertiginous. A working farm-house, built heavy and solid and real, with animals visible even from the outside—the shape of horses in a paddock, the sound of something large moving in a barn.

Gandalf was already at the door. The company pressed through it in rapid succession, and you went with them, and the door swung shut behind the last of you—Nori, who had the wild-eyed look of a man who had been running directly away from something and was now very focused on the door remaining closed.

The sound outside grew.

Then passed, diminished.

The company breathed.

"Well," Gandalf said, with the equanimity of a man who had not been as worried as everyone else, or had been worried in a different way and was not going to discuss either option. "Here we are."

"Here we are," Dwalin repeated, with a quality of feeling that the words did not technically contain. He looked around the interior of the enormous house—the high rafters, the long tables built to a scale that made the dwarves look like they were sitting in a child's play-house, even more so then the realms of men, the central hearth with its fire, the general sense of a home that was lived in by someone considerably larger than anyone present. "Who lives here?"

"He is called Beorn," Gandalf said. "He is something not unlike a man , he is a skin-changer—he takes the form of a great bear at will, or the bear takes his form. I am not entirely clear on which way round it goes." A pause in which Gandalf received the full collective expression of fourteen people who felt this clarification had opened more questions than it had closed.

"He is—complicated," Gandalf added. "but he will not harm you here, under his own roof, if you behave with reasonable courtesy."

"Was that him," you said. "Outside ?"

"Almost certainly," Gandalf said.

You stood with this information for a moment. Looked at the door. At the fire. At the high, solid rafters. "Right," you said.

"You're taking that very calmly," Bilbo observed, from beside you.

"I'm really, really not," you said, your voice climbing in bith pitch and panic. "I've just got a limited amount of panic available and I'm trying to be strategic about it rather then just handing it out willy-nilly."

Bilbo looked at you with the specific expression of a hobbit who found this approach both understandable and slightly alarming, and handed you something from his pocket, which turned out to be a piece of dried fruit, and you ate it, and felt marginally better.

The company looked at the walls of the house, at the enormous dimensions of everything—the table that ran along the far wall, the chairs around it, the ceiling crossbeams and did the arithmetic of what that implied about the size of the person who lived here, and nobody said anything, which was its own form of response.

You were not, in all honesty, listening particularly closely to the second half of Gandalf's speech.

You were watching the door to the left of the main entrance, where a large brown dog had appeared from somewhere and was sitting on the threshold looking at the company with the patient, evaluating attention of an animal deciding whether the new arrivals warranted concern or interest, and your entire nervous system had reached a conclusion without consulting your brain.

The dog looked at you. Its tail moved.

"Hey buddy," you said, quietly.

Its tail moved more.

You had always liked animals. This was not news to the company, who had watched you with Sebastian, with Mindy, with Radagast's rabbits, and who had catalogued this quality of yours with the particular fond attention of people who found it telling. But this house offered the specific, overwhelming delight of someone who had been given a very large present and was having trouble deciding where to begin with it.

The dog—who was enormous and warm and apparently decided within thirty seconds that you were acceptable—was followed, once the company had moved to the table and the process of eating had begun, by a cat that appeared from behind a storage chest and sat near your feet with the composed attention of a cat that had made a unilateral decision about you. Then a goat who had wandered from somewhere and who you fed a handful of dried hay from near the wall, an offering which was accepted with the casual entitlement of an animal accustomed to being catered to.

The food was—a lot. Beorn's table was set with the quantities appropriate for a man who either had very large portions himself or cooked by the rule that more was better than less. Bread of a weight and density that could have served a practical structural purpose. Cheese in quantities that Bombur looked at with the eyes of a dwarf who was genuinely overwhelmed by the abundance available.

Honey in enormous clay pots, with a quality and depth to it that suggested the bees in the rafters were not merely decorative. Cream, butter, various things pickled and preserved.

The company ate. This was not a surprise—the company ate at every available opportunity, with the thoroughness of people who had learned not to take provision for granted. You ate less than your share because you were occupied.

The dog had been joined by a second dog. The second dog had been joined by the cat, who had changed its position to the bench beside you and was now sitting with its front feet folded under it in the loaf position, purring with a consistency that suggested this was its natural mode of existence. The goat had found someone else to interest it and been replaced by a small brown chicken who appeared from nowhere with the decisive confidence of a chicken who lived here and considered the table area it's personal territory.

"You have not touched your food Lass" Balin said, from across the table.

"I'm getting to it," you said, breaking off a piece of bread and offering it to the larger of the two dogs, who took it with enormous, gentle delicacy.

"Getting to it and feeding it to the animals are not the same activity," Balin said.

"I'm doing both," you said. "Multitasking."

"The dogs are," Balin said, with the deliberate patience of a dwarf selecting his words, "extremely large and perfectly capable of feeding themselves."

"They're very sweet," you said.

The cat beside you shifted and pressed its head against your arm.

"That's a cat," Balin said, "not a dog."

"I know it's a cat, Balin, I can tell the difference—"

"And it has cream on the table right in front of it which it has been ignoring entirely in favour of sitting next to you."

"It's friendly," you said.

Balin made the sound he made when he had more to say and was exercising considerable restraint about not saying it, and returned to his food.

You attempted genuine effort. You ate the bread—the whole piece, without sharing it—a portion of the cheese and some of the preserves, and you were making progress on a second piece of bread when the larger dog put his enormous head in your lap and looked up at you with the expression dogs produced when they wanted something and had correctly identified the most effective angle of approach.

You looked at the bread. At the dog. At Balin, who was watching you and knew exactly what was about to happen and had already decided how he felt about it.

"Don't" Balin said.

You gave the dog the bread.

Balin stood up from his chair, came around the table with the deliberateness of someone who had a plan and was executing it, and took gentle but entirely firm hold of your arm. "Up," he said.

"I'm eating—"

"You have been feeding the livestock for the last twenty minutes while your bowl goes cold." He guided you, with the patient, inexorable authority of a dwarf who was not going to be argued with, away from the table and from the very large dog and toward the end of the bench nearest the fire, where a smaller bowl had been set and which was notably located in an area with fewer animals. "Sit. Eat. Properly."

"They were hungry," you said.

"They live here," Balin said. "They are fed daily. Quite generously, from the looks of them." He sat down beside you with the settled authority of a person positioning himself to ensure compliance. "Kiyanê, would you please eat." Balin said, with the specific, slightly exasperated affection of someone who had said the word before they'd decided to say it.

"What does that mean?" you said.

He was quiet for a moment. "Eat your food," he said, and applied himself to his own bowl with focused attention.

You looked at him sideways for a moment, at the pink that had appeared, very faintly, above his white beard. "Balin."

"It's Khuzdul," he said, to his food. "A term of—it is— it's considered a form of address." He cleared his throat. "Finish the bread."

You finished the bread. And the rest of the bowl. And a portion of the cheese that Kíli was attempting to claim from the far end of the table until you transferred a significant share of your excess across to him and Fíli, who both received this redistribution with the cheerful efficiency of dwarves who were never going to refuse additional food regardless of how it arrived.

Across the table, one of the dogs had found its way back to the bench you'd vacated and was looking at your old seat with the resigned acceptance of an animal who had missed their moment.

You looked at it.

Balin put his hand over yours in the firm, preemptive way of someone blocking a move before it was made.

"Try it," he said. "And I'll bind your hands and feed you myself."

The evening settled over the house—gradually, softly, each wave of activity quieting into the next, the company winding down from the day's accumulated adrenaline toward the exhaustion that followed fear and its accompanying spirit across the countryside.

Dwaves went down along the wall of the main hall where the floor was cleanest and the fire was warmest. The animals distributed themselves through the space with the casual territorial competence of creatures who knew where they liked to sleep and weren't particularly concerned about the temporary guests.

The large dog had claimed a spot near the fire with the immovable confidence of an animal who had done this every night for years and saw no reason to change now. The cat had returned to the bench and showed no sign of relocating.

You'd settled near Balin, the arrangement having become almost default without either of you having to decide it was. He had the small leather-bound ledger out, the one he carried in the inner pocket of his coat, and the candle between you threw a warm, intimate circle of light across the open page.

"From the supply account," Balin said. "Date, contents, usage. I'll dictate."

You produced the stub of charcoal you'd been using for writing since early in the journey—you'd progressed through several of them, and Ori had begun handing them over without being asked, which was one of the small, specific kindnesses you'd accumulated and didn't know how to account for—you held it ready over the page.

"Provisions at entry," Balin said, and you wrote it. "Bread, preserved meat, cheese, honey, cream. Status at exit—" He paused, checking his internal accounting. "Significantly replenished."

You wrote it into the neat columns on the page.