• Wandering Words •

Fíli was ahead of you on the path, close enough that his pack was within arm's reach when the path narrowed and you needed something to orient by. Balin was behind you, his breathing steady and deliberate, a presence you'd learned to calibrate your pace by in the dark. Between the two of them you'd made it this far without stepping sideways off the edge of the path, which felt like the relevant metric tonight.

"Nearly at the next bend," Fíli said, over his shoulder, not loud—sound behaved strangely on the cliff face, carrying sideways in ways that had surprised you early on, and they'd all learned to keep their voices down on the path.

"How long has this pass been here?" you said, to Balin, because talking helped with the cold.

"Longer than anyone remembers," Balin said, behind you. "These passes are old. Older than the mountains feel, and the mountains feel very old."

"That's not—actually that's a completely reasonable answer," you said, because you'd stopped expecting things in this world to have the kind of origin stories you were accustomed to, and it had made various conversations considerably easier.

Lightning split the sky ahead—a full, brilliant crack of it, not the kind you'd seen from windows at home but the kind that occupied the whole visible sky, illuminating the cliff face and the drop below and the extraordinary, terrifying expanse of the mountain range in one white frame of visibility. The thunder followed, and it was—it was not ordinary thunder.

You'd heard thunder before. Everyone had heard thunder. Thunder was a sound, atmospheric, background, the sort of thing you listened to from under a duvet with a cup of tea and found atmospheric.

This was a sound that came up through the rock beneath your feet before it arrived through the air, a sound with physical weight, and the cliff face moved under it, a shudder you felt through your boots and up your legs and into the base of your spine, and Balin's hand was at your arm before you'd quite processed what you were reacting to.

"Hold on," he said. "Hold to the rock. Do not look down." You pressed your back against the cliff face and most definitely—did not—look down.

Another lightning crack, closer, and in the second of white light it gave you, you saw something you didn't understand immediately—two cliff faces across the gorge, impossibly large, moving. Not sliding, not falling—moving. Deliberately. With the gathered, colossal intention of something that had been standing still for a very long time and had decided to stop.

One of them lifted an arm.

You stared.

"What are they?" Bilbo's voice came from further back, high and tight with controlled alarm.

"Giants," Dwalin said, from somewhere behind Balin. "Stone giants," his voice had a quality you hadn't heard from Dwalin before—not fear, exactly, something more like the specific alertness of a warrior encountering something that could not be fought in any way he knew how and was recalculating accordingly.

The cliff face shuddered again as the nearest one swung something—its arm, the arm of a stone giant, thousands of feet of moving rock—through the air. The crack of impact on the far cliff carried sound that took your teeth with it. Rain and loose stone cascaded down the path in rivulets that splashed across your boots, and the company pressed itself against the rock face with the collective instinct of people who understood, very clearly, the physical mathematics of the situation.

"We need to move!" Thorin's voice, from the front of the line, cutting through the wind. "Keep to the rock face—do not stop—"

The ground lurched.

Not the path. Not the rock behind you — the section of cliff immediately beneath your feet shifted, tilted, and in the lightning flash that followed you understood, with a cold clarity that was worse than the rain, that you were not standing on the path anymore. You were standing on a knee. The stone under you was not cliff face but the outstretched leg of one of the giants, and it was moving, slowly, with the grinding indifference of something that did not know you existed and would not have cared if it did.

"Move!" Thorin again—louder now, the command stripped to its essentials.

You moved with Fíli ahead and Balin at your back and the wind screaming sideways and the giant's leg tilting beneath you and the path—the actual path, carved stone, real and fixed and not moving—was three feet to your left and then you were on it, and Fíli's hand was on your arm, and Balin was right behind you, and the section of stone you'd been standing on ground away into the dark below as the giant completed its step.

You stood on the path, breathed and looked at the space where you'd just been standing.

"Everyone forward!" Thorin's voice. "There—there, a cave! Get inside!"

The cave was small, cut back into the cliff face, barely large enough for fifteen people to be inside and call it inside rather than simply not quite outside. The ceiling was low—you stood with your head tilted forward slightly—the floor was uneven, and it smelled of old rock and something underneath old rock that was indefinable but not unpleasant, like the smell of rain but from below rather than above.

Everyone was soaked. Everyone was cold. Everyone was doing the particular immediate accounting that followed close calls—checking themselves, checking the person next to them, the wordless inventory of limbs and status that the company was extremely efficient at.

Thorin stood at the cave mouth and looked out at the giants for a moment—they were moving away now, trading blows with the careless force of something that didn't have a small range—and then turned and looked across the company.

"We rest here," he said. "First light, we move on." He looked at the cave—the low ceiling, the limited floor space, the fifteen people crammed into it with their wet packs and their weapons and their general accumulated dampness. "Sleep if you can."

"What about Gandalf?" you said, from where you'd pressed yourself against the far wall, "we're supposed to be meeting Gandalf. You said—you said before we left Rivendell that he'd meet us in the mountains."

Thorin looked at you. The look had the quality of a man who had the same thought several hours ago and had been keeping it managed. "Plans change," he said.

"Plans change?" you said. "Right. That's—okay. He's fine though? Presumably?"

"He's Gandalf," Balin said, settling himself beside you against the wall with the resignation of a dwarf who had been wet and cold in worse circumstances and was going to be a practical about this one. "If anything were capable of making an end of him, I think it would have done so by now."

"That's not particularly comforting."

"No but it is accurate," Balin said, which was his version of the same thing.

You leaned back against the cave wall and looked at the ceiling and listened to the company arrange itself in the small space with the practiced efficiency of people who had been sleeping on the ground for ages and had made their peace with it. The thunder battle outside continued, muffled by the rock, distant now, the sound of it rolling through the mountain like something being settled rather than something beginning.

Bifur was sitting across from you, back against the wall, with a small object in his hands.

You'd been watching him with it without meaning to—he turned it between his thick fingers with a delicacy that was inconsistent with his general impression, which was of a person built primarily for durability. The object was small and wooden, about the size of his fist, and as he turned it you began to make out the shape—a bird, carved with a precision that suggested serious skill, its wings folded, its head tilted at an angle that was somehow entirely convincing.

He caught you looking.

You looked away. He made a short sound—not annoyed, something more like permission—and held the bird out to you.

You took it carefully. The carving was extraordinary —not just the overall shape, but the small details, the individual suggestion of feathers along the wing, the particular curvature of the beak, the way the feet were positioned, gripping an invisible branch. There was a small wheel at the base of the body, set into the wood, and when you turned it with your thumb the wings opened and closed in a slow, smooth arc, the mechanism hidden inside the body driving them through a motion that was—it was flight, that's what it was, the particular slow opening of a bird preparing to leave the ground.

You looked up at Bifur, who was watching you with the careful attention of someone who has shown someone something they made and is waiting to see if they understand it.

You didn't have the Khuzdul for anything adequate. What you had was a handful of words and the expression on your face, the expression on your face apparently communicated the relevant thing, because Bifur's own expression shifted into something warmer.

"Atrâbul," you tried—beautiful, one of the words Ori had written in your small running list—Bifur's eyebrows went up in the faint surprise of someone who hadn't expected the compliment, and then he laughed, quietly, a real laugh, and took the bird back from you.

"Bifur was aToymaker," Balin murmured, from your other side, very low. "Before Erebor. One of the finest."

You looked at Bifur turning the bird in his hands, making the wings open and close in the dim light of the cave. At the small, careful mechanism inside the body that no one had asked him to make and that served no purpose here, on a mountain pass in the rain, other than the fact that he had made it because he was someone who made things and always had been, and losing a mountain didn't change talent.

You looked at the axe embedded in his temple—the axe that had lodged there in some battle, that no healer had been able to remove, it had cost him his knowledge of English, or Common speech as they called it here, as well as a quantity of other things and had not, evidently, cost him this—then looked away, because he hadn't offered you that information and you had nothing adequate to do with it anyway.

The thunder outside shifted to something quieter. The rain continued. Somewhere in the company, Bombur was already asleep, the sound of it regular and architectural.

You closed your eyes.

Thorin sat by the cave entrance, watch required someone awake and positioned at the opening, which was wide enough to observe the path while still having the rock at your back, Thorin had claimed the first watch without discussion and hadn't been replaced, which was not unusual. He slept less than the rest of the company on difficult nights, and was rarely pressed on it.

He was not looking at the path, it had happened gradually—the way attention drifts gradually, the way eyes find something and stay with it without announcing a decision. He'd been watching the entrance, watching the storm's retreat, watching the gradual change in the darkness outside from the deep black of active storm to the quieter dark of late night, and then at some point he had turned his head and his eyes had found you against the far wall and had stayed.

You were asleep in the particular way you slept when the day had taken a lot—entirely, without the restless edge that showed up on easier nights, your head tipped back slightly against the stone, one hand loose in your lap with a blanket half-fallen from your shoulder. Your hair had dried in the way wet hair dried without attention, which was to say every direction simultaneously, and you'd tried to contain some of it behind one ear at some point and it had declined to stay.

Thorin watched you sleep with the completely unguarded expression of someone who believed himself unobserved. He was thinking—which was not unusual. He was nearly always thinking. But the quality of the thinking was unusual, the specific direction of it, the particular territory it kept finding itself in when his attention was this unmanaged and this focussed in one direction.

He was thinking about the great hall in Erebor. About the light that came through the upper arches in the morning and fell in long diagonals across the floor, and how a person standing in that light looked different from a person standing anywhere else, and how it would—how it might fall on—

He was thinking about the market level, about the jewellers' quarter, where he'd spent considerable time in his youth for reasons his grandfather had attributed to interest in craft and which had had rather more to do with the particular pleasure of watching stone become something else—a raw gem lifted from the ground, rough, unapologetic, and worked by careful hands into something that could be set, could be worn, could be given.

He was thinking, specifically, about the setters' craft, the discipline of it, the business of finding a stone and knowing what form it wanted and having the skill to give it that form. He was thinking about what he would—what someone might—what you might.

He caught himself.

The thought had gone somewhere very specific and he'd followed it several steps before he'd noticed where he was with a quality he was unprepared for—not shame, exactly, not discomfort, but the particular startled awareness of someone who has looked up from where they are and found the landscape entirely unfamiliar, which meant they'd been walking without paying attention, which meant they'd gotten somewhere they hadn't decided to go.

"You're going to bore a hole in her if you stare any harder."

Balin's voice, from somewhere at his right shoulder, quiet and entirely unsurprised, the tone of a man who had been watching someone stare for long enough to have an opinion about it.

Thorin turned his head. Balin was sitting up from where he'd been lying, rolled blanket across his lap, looking at Thorin with the expression that Balin reserved for situations he found both amusing and tactically important.

"I'm keeping watch," Thorin said, making considerable effort to clear his throat.

"Aye," Balin said. "You're keeping very thorough watch alright."

"The path is quiet,"

"It is," Balin agreed. He looked at you for a moment, then back at Thorin, with the considering attention of a dwarf who had spent many decades watching people and had developed opinions.

"You know," he said, conversationally, at a volume that was very carefully calibrated to carry to Thorin and no further, "When a dwarf lord finds himself staring at a lass with that expression for that length of time, there are certain—implications."

Thorin said nothing, but fixed him with a look that could melt stone faster then any forge.

"Braids, for instance," Balin said.

"Balin," Thorin said.

"I'm simply observing that if you were to stare at her any harder, someone in this company might conclude you were considering—"

"Balin."

"Thorin" Balin said, with the serene, untouchable composure of a dwarf who had known Thorin Oakenshield for the entirety of his life and understood precisely the limits of his ability to be intimidated by him, "You might want to manage your watch rotations more carefully."

Thorin turned back to the cave entrance. His jaw set in the particular way it set when he had decided a conversation was over and was implementing that decision unilaterally. "Go back to sleep," he said.

Balin settled himself back down with the unhurried ease of a man who had said everything he'd intended to say and was perfectly comfortable with how it had landed and closed his eyes.

Thorin stared at the cave entrance for the remainder of the watch with the focused, deliberate attention of a man who had made an absolute decision about where his eyes were going to be and was maintaining it through the specific effort of will that only becomes necessary when something is pulling your attention in another direction.

He did not look back at your sleeping form.

More than twice.

You came out of sleep with the same force of someone tipped and plunged into ice, instantly but with none of the alert of usual waking.

"Up."

Thorin's voice, close, urgent, with none of its usual management.

You opened your eyes. The cave was dark, the same dark it had been, no first light visible. Thorin was standing in the centre of the space, and the expression on his face was one you had not seen before—completely, instantly alert, stripped of everything except attention.

"Everyone up. Now. Move—"

The floor gave way.

Not collapsing. That was the wrong word—collapse implied falling apart, randomness, the ordinary failure of material under pressure. This was something else. This was mechanical. The floor of the cave swung open in one clean, hinged motion, like a trapdoor on a scale that should not have been possible, and the darkness below it was total and absolute and moving at speed toward you.

You grabbed for the wall. Your palms hit stone and found nothing—the stone was smooth, decades of contact having worn it polished, and your fingers dragged across it without purchase and left nothing, and the drop took you.

The drop was long. Long enough to understand that it was long, long enough to hear the company around you—voices, sounds of impact against stone, the scraping of hands and boots against the shaft walls, someone's pack hitting the curve of the passage and bouncing—and you tried to find the walls with your feet, tried to slow yourself, and the stone scraped your palms and there was nothing to hold and the dark rushed past and the air rushed up, and then—

The landing was not clean, you came down in a pile that was partly other people and partly a structure that had been designed, you understood dimly, to receive bodies—a crude cage of metal bars, rusted and bent but intact, the shape of it like a giant hand half-closed, the bars curved upward at irregular intervals with gaps wide enough to see through and not wide enough to do anything useful with. You were on your back on top of someone, there were hands helping you upright before you'd finished processing the impact, and above the open top of the cage the shaft you'd fallen through disappeared into dark, and below—

Below was light. Yellow, sourceless, everywhere, coming from the walls and the ceiling and the spilling, chaotic architecture of a city built in the deep places of the mountain, a city that was not built so much as accumulated—bridges and walkways and platforms and structures of lashed wood and twisted metal, layer upon layer disappearing down into more dark, the whole thing vast and impossible and swarming.

The sound was what reached you first—an uneven, surging sound, not music and not voices and not any single thing, but the combined noise of something enormous being alive in a space underground. It rose and fell like breath. It had a quality of anticipation.

They came from every surface simultaneously—dropping from above, swarming up from below, pouring along the walkways from both directions—the horror of them hit you before the specific details did, the general impression arriving as a single, complete, animal wrongness before your eyes had organised it into parts.

Pale. That was the first part, a sickly pale the way things that lived without light were pale—not white, not the clean pale of snow or paper, but the pale of something from which the colour had been drained by absence, by centuries of underground dark, by generations of it. The sores were second—clusters of them, raw against the pale skin, some old and crusted, some new. The eyes were third—wide, mobile, accustomed to this darkness in a way that said very clearly that this was their place and you were at the mercy of it.

They clawed at the bars of the cage. They pried it open with the practiced ease of something done many times before. They poured through the gaps like water finding its level, and the company came together by instinct—weapons going for weapons, backs going to backs—then more of them came, more and more, the numbers were simply not a number you could do anything with and they had you.

They drove you along the walkways. Not slowly—at a pace that required moving at their speed or going down, and the walkways were narrow and the drops on either side were real, the company moved, because the only other option was to stop, and the diseased fingers curled into your hair next to your scalp told you unquestionably that stopping was not available.

You where close to Balin. He didn't look at you—he was looking ahead, and his expression was the particular focused calm of a person marshalling their resources—but his arm found yours as you moved, the solid, reliable contact of it, and it was enough.

More noise, more bodies, more of the layered, accumulated structure of a civilisation built entirely without sunlight or any aesthetic consideration that wasn't primarily functional. The throne itself was vast and crude and occupied by something that made the rest of the goblins look, by comparison, small and almost orderly.

The Great Goblin was large in the way a thing that has never been told to stop growing is large—not the size of a troll, not the size of a stone giant, but large for the space he occupied and large for the body underneath the body, all of it draped in the remnants of something that might once have been garments and had since become part of the architecture of him, the Great Goblin was everything the rest of Goblin Town was, but more.

The wattle beneath his chin swung as he turned his head, surveying the company being driven into the cavernous opening before his throne with the entitled interest of something accustomed to receiving tribute and pleased with the quality of this delivery.

"Who would be so bold," the Great Goblin said, and his voice was—wrong in the way all of it was wrong, the pitch of it too high for the body it came out of, carrying across the noise of the crowd with the particular projection of a performer who had made a lifetime's study of a captive audience "as to come armed into my kingdom?"

He leaned forward on his throne and looked at the company with small, sharp eyes. "Spies? Thieves?" He let each word land. "Assassins?"

"Dwarves, Your Malevolence," said the smaller goblin at his side—a narrow, unctuous thing with eyes that moved faster than any other part of it. "We found them on the Front Porch."

The Great Goblin rocked back. "Well, don't just stand there—search them! Every crack, every crevice!"

You stood very still while the goblins worked through the company, because moving seemed like the kind of thing that would make them more interested in you, and being more interesting to them was genuinely the last thing you wanted.

They took the weapons first efficiently, with the practiced brutality of people who knew exactly where a dwarf kept a blade and had no patience for the finding of it—Thorin's sword pulled from the scabbard and thrown aside, Dwalin's axes stripped from his back, Kíli's bow taken with the string still strung, and they worked through the company methodically.

Your fingers moved to the hilt of your dagger for half a heartbeat—you felt the dagger pulled from your hip before you'd finished reaching for it, then pain exploded across the back of your hand as yellowed teeth sank in. You yelped despite yourself, the goblin snarling around a mouthful of your blood like it had won some great prize. It scuttled back a pace, dagger in its grip, and hissed at you with wet, triumphant malice.

Balin was to your left and slightly forward, and Dwalin had positioned himself to your right, and neither of them had done anything so obvious as to stand in front of you, but both of them were standing in a way that made a shape you fit inside and you were grateful for it and did not mention it.

The goblin searching through Óin's pack held up the dwarven ear trumpet with an expression of profound suspicion.

"It is my belief, Your Great Protuberance," the narrow goblin said, examining something he'd pulled from the discarded pile of belongings, "that they are in league with Elves."

The Great Goblin's face shifted through several registers of distaste. He picked up a small object from the pile—turned it over, read the inscription. "'Made in Rivendell.'" He dropped it with the contempt of a man who had never agreed to be impressed by anything from Rivendell and saw no reason to change that agreement. "Bah. Second Age. Couldn't give it away."

He rose slightly from his throne, the wattle swinging. "I want the truth, why are you here ? Tell me, warts and all."

Óin, who had been watching the proceedings with the expression of a man whose patience was being tested, attempted to step forward. "You're going to have to speak up," he said, at a volume calibrated for the hard of hearing, which in this context meant for everyone. "Your boys have flattened my trumpet."

The Great Goblin fixed him with a look. "I'll flatten more than your trumpet."

Bofur, never a man to miss a role that needed filling, stepped forward with the bright expression of someone who had assessed the situation and determined that talking was significantly better than the available alternatives.

"If it's more information you want, I'm the one you should speak to!" he said, with an enthusiasm that was either genuine or a work of tremendous art. "We were on the road. Well—it's not so much of a road as a path. Actually, it's not even that come to think of it, it's more like a track. Honestly, if you want to call it anything—"

The Great Goblin's gaze had moved.

It moved the way the gaze of something large moves when it has found a new point of interest—slowly, with the gathered intention of a thing accustomed to having its attention mean something. It had moved off Bofur. It had moved past the rest of the company. It had found you, at the back of the group, and stopped.

"Well," said the Great Goblin, and something in his voice shifted into a register that was worse than the interrogation register, something with a performance quality to it, playing to the audience of the crowd around him. His chin wattle moved as he leaned forward to address the company, but his eyes didn't leave you. "Who have we here?"

You said nothing, you where focused, you were looking at a point slightly below his throne and trying to make yourself the least interesting thing in the room.

"Is this one yours?" He addressed Thorin with the pointed mockery of something that knew exactly who it was speaking to. "Traveling in style, Thorin Oakenshield—King Under the Mountain." The title landed with the weight of a weapon deliberately chosen for where it would hit.

King ?—that's—that can't be right—one of them would have told me

Your eyes went to the back of Thorin's head—to the set of his shoulders, to the line of his neck—the word reorganised something that had been sitting slightly out of place since the beginning, a piece of the picture that you'd had without understanding its position, and it landed now with the particular weight of things that should have been obvious and weren't until they were.

King under the Mountain.

Not just a leader.

Not just a dwarf with authority, experience someone the company deferred to because they'd known him longest or trusted him most. A king. The rightful kind, by blood and by the accounting of his people, and the mountain was—shit—Erebor was his ? he was standing in a goblin court with his hands stripped of weapons and his head up and not one line of him offering the Great Goblin an inch of the deference the Great Goblin was clearly accustomed to receiving.

He didn't see you look. He was facing forward as the great goblin sneered with delight. "Did the great king bring a lady to the deep places?"

The words where still landing on you like stones hitting water. King. Thorin. Thorin was a—you filed this with tremendous force into the back of your mind and kept your face entirely still.

"She is none of your concern—" Thorin's voice, controlled and very dangerous, from somewhere to your left.

You stood still. Dwalin's elbow was against your arm. Kíli, ahead and to your right, glanced back at you once—brief, quick, his expression stripped of its usual brightness to something that was purely checking that you were still upright.

Glóin said something to you, very low, that was half Common and half Khuzdul. Balin, close on your left, said nothing. Did not turn. Just existed there, solid and certain, and it was enough.

The Great Goblin had resettled on his throne with the expression of a man arriving at the climax of a performance he'd been planning. He spread his hands wide, addressing the whole hall.

"If they will not talk," he announced, with the satisfied relish of someone quoting from a personal motto, "we'll make them squawk !"

The crowd loved it.

"Bring out the Mangler!"

Something moved at the back of the hall.

"Bring out the Bone Breaker!"

More movement—goblins, many goblins, assembled around something large that was being hauled up from a lower level by chains, the sound of it grinding up through the platform, the shape of it not yet visible but the sound of it alone producing a very cold, specific quality of fear.

"Start with—" The Great Goblin's gaze swept the company. Lingered. The wattle moved. "—the female."

Your heart became a very loud thing, the company shifted. Not dramatically—not in a way the goblins could have identified as a response—but something moved through all of them, a collective tightening, not unexpected and the positions adjusted by fractional degrees that added up, in sum, to a ring around you that was as close as they could make it without the goblins having a reason to pull them away.

Dwalin's elbow pressed harder against your arm.

"It'll be alright, lass," Balin said, very quietly. The calmness in his voice was not the easy kind. "You'll be alright."

"They won't get near you," Kíli said, not looking at you, his voice low and certain with the conviction of someone making a promise they intend to keep regardless of the logistics.

"Look at me," said another voice—Bofur, on your other side now, having moved without you noticing, his hand a brief, firm pressure on your own before it dropped away. His face was the face he wore when he was serious, the one without any of the usual warmth replaced by something quieter and more durable than warmth.

"Look at me. None of them are gonna touch you, alright?" You gave him the smallest nod. He turned back forward.

The devices were coming up the stairs on the backs of many, many goblins.

Thorin, Balin, and Bofur moved at the same moment—a fast, coordinated rush toward the throne—the goblins were faster, a surge of filthy bodies and clawing hands they fell on the three of them, hauling them down with sheer weight of numbers dragging them backward onto the platform, as the Great Goblin rose from his throne with the satisfaction of something that had expected this and was pleased to have it confirmed.

You watched in horror at sight of it—of strong dwarves being yanked down like sacks of meat, claws tearing at beards and clothes—sent a wave of cold dread through you.

"Oh, feisty! I like it!" He spread his arms. He had begun to sing—some verse of his own composition, judging by his expression—the words rattling through the hall.

"Bones will be shattered, necks will be wrung!"

A goblins fingers snaked into your hair again claws finding purchase with a unforgiving scrape across your scalp.

"You'll be beaten and battered, from racks you'll be hung!"

The mounting fear for them, and for yourself, rose like bile in your throat.

"You will die down here and never be found—"

The crackling breath of a goblin wheezed past your ear as it's fingers yanked you towards the edge of the platform.

"Down in the deep of Goblin Town!"

The company erupted. The hall shook with it.

The devices were on the platform now, being unchained and positioned with a horrible, practiced precision—you didn't look directly at them, couldn't, your eyes sliding away from the shapes of them with the particular reflexive self-protection of someone whose brain had identified that looking wasn't going to help anything.

The goblins were clearing a space around you, specifically, marching you forward with the efficient choreography of people who had done this before, and the company was being held back, and you could feel—could actually physically feel—the particular, terrible quality of the next ten seconds, before—

The light was blinding. Not the dim yellow-orange of the goblin fires, not the filtered dark of the cave—blinding, white and absolute, filling the hall from everywhere at once, and the sound that came with it was a crack that cut through the noise of the crowd like a blade through water, and in the moment of stunned silence that followed, in the space between one breath and the next—

"Take up your arms."

Standing on the platform, his staff blazing, his grey robes throwing a shadow that went in seventeen wrong directions simultaneously, Gandalf's voice. From everywhere and nowhere and his voice carrying with the quality it had sometimes, the quality that made you understand he was not a wizard who happened to have a staff but was something else wearing the shape of a wizard for convenience.

"Fight."

And the company did, the goblins' screaming took on an entirely different quality, their fingers unweaving themselves from your hair with an abhorrent series of tugs, claws from hands and feet alike pressing you down in the wake of the goblins departure.

It was not a fight in the sense of something with a shape. It was a scramble, a continuous urgent forward motion through opposition, and the opposition was everywhere and largely between you and wherever was not here.

Weapons came back into hands from somewhere—the goblins having dropped or lost the advantage in the chaos of the light and the general stampede. You saw Thorin's sword find his hand and immediately understood, from the way it moved, that the two of them had been apart long enough that reuniting them had its own quality.

Your hand moved instinctively to your pocket, fingers searching for the shape of the vial of oil. It was gone. You patted uselessly in the pocket again, dread pooling cold and heavy in your stomach, when you glanced down, your dagger was nowhere in sight either—lost somewhere in the chaos of grasping claws and scrambling bodies, or perhaps taken by the same greedy hands that had stripped the company of everything useful.

You had nothing.

In the middle of the fighting, amid the roar of dwarves and the shrieking of goblins, Thorin’s broad frame cut through the press of creatures like a breaking wave.

A goblin lunged at you from the side, but Thorin’s arm swept it away with brutal efficiency, his other hand closing briefly on your arm to steady you.

“Follow Kíli!” he ordered, voice every piece the sharp commanding presence you'd come to know, even over the din, leaving no room for argument or hesitation. “Now—go!”

You nodded numbly at Thorin and followed Kíli.

Dwalin cleared a section of walkway to the left, both axes and an efficiency of movement that left no aftermath. You went where the section was clear.

Kíli fired from a crouching position, two arrows in fast succession, both landing, and moved with the full fluid speed of someone who thought in terms of the next position rather than the current one.

The walkways were the problem. They were suspended—rope and plank over the central drop— and every impact, every body going down, every goblin pile drove vibration through the structure and the structure wasn't designed for the kind of use it was currently getting. Sections swayed. Sections tilted. You moved across them with your arms slighty out for balance, which your raw palms objected to, and you told your palms to be quiet.

The second section of fighting was deeper in—a chokepoint where the walkway narrowed between two rock faces and the goblins had reinforced it, many of them, the kind of numbers that meant the company had to come through sideways and sequentially rather than together. Thorin first, because that was simply what happened—Thorin Oakenshield went first through anything that required going through— the goblins in the chokepoint encountered whatever it was that Thorin was when he stopped managing it and let it work, the results were comprehensive enough that the company made it through with less difficulty than the numbers had suggested.

You came through last, Balin's hand at the back of your arm, on the other side the walkway opened onto a larger platform and you could see, ahead and below, actual light—not dim damp firelight but a quality of light you recognised from outside, the particular cool and lateral quality of daylight finding its way in through rock, and the sight of it produced a surge of something through your chest that was not quite physical.

"There!" Gandalf's voice, ahead, indicating the direction with his staff—not pointing but commanding, the gesture of someone who has orchestrated exits before and has opinions about the pace of them.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

The walkway ahead was long and dropped in stages, and the Great Goblin was coming up through them. He came through the lower section of walkway like something that had decided the walkway was an obstacle rather than a surface, and the planks parted for him in the way things parted for something that massive moving that fast, he arrived on the platform above you with the full, terrible dignity of someone who had decided the theatrical portion of the evening was over.

He had been substantial from you particular view duringn the interrogation, he was substantially more enormous at this proximity, and the proximity was not optional.

Gandalf met him, with two strikes, both of them precise, both of them with staff and sword moving in the same figure with no wasted motion between them, and the Great Goblin, who was a very large creature with a very large opinion of his own indestructibility, sat down with the surprised expression of something that has not been made to sit down before.

The walkway beneath him registered this development. The structural opinion of the walkway on the matter of having a creature the size of the Great Goblin deposited onto it suddenly and with force was delivered immediately and comprehensively—the planking gave, the whole section went, and the section adjacent to it went because it was attached, and the one adjacent to that went because physics required it, the company was suddenly on a section of walkway that was moving in the particular way of things that have become disconnected from their purpose and are now in the process of becoming gravity's problem instead.

The section tilted, the far end going down, and the angle went past manageable and into the territory where your feet were no longer in agreement with the surface they were supposed to be on, and you went forward loosing your footing— toward the lower edge, toward the open drop beneath where there was nothing but the pin prick of outside—your hands went out, finding nothing but air as you pitched forward from the platform.

Thorin, from behind, solid, immediate and completely without hesitation, threw his arm around your middle, he was shorter than you, which meant the angle of it was different than you expected, his forearm across your stomach rather than high on your ribs, and the contact was—substantial, the hold of someone who had no intention of letting go, and you grabbed the nearest thing available which was Balin's shoulder with both hands and zero apology, Balin had gone down to one knee on the tilting surface and was very close to the edge himself, and you held onto Balin's shoulder and Thorin held onto you as the section of walkway continued its long, angled, scraping descent into the dark below at a speed that suggested it was in a hurry to arrive wherever it was going.

The descent took long enough to be something. Long enough that the company had sorted themselves out on the tilting surface into whatever equilibrium was available, and the dark rushed past on all sides, and the distant light at the end of the shaft grew gradually, agonisingly larger.

Behind you, you couldn't see Thorin's face, only feel the arm around you and the quality of the hold, which did not loosen.

Balin was looking up at you, your hands on his shoulder, his expression did something—a brief, specific something—then his eyes went past you, to Thorin, and whatever he saw there completed the something into something else, a thought arriving in full, Balin's expression closed back into its usual composure so seamlessly that you'd have missed it entirely if you hadn't been looking directly at his face.

You'd found all three and were now on the lowest terrace sitting on a carved stone bench with your hands in your lap and the sound of the falls somewhere below and the general ambient beauty of Rivendell doing its composed, unhurried best to be good for you.

You didn't hear Lord Elrond approach. You heard him arrive—the sound of his step on the stone stair behind you, deliberate enough to announce itself without being loud, the particular consideration of someone who understood that appearing silently behind a person who could be startled easily would be unkind.

You looked up. He inclined his head, a greeting rather than a question you'd gathered, and gestured at the bench beside you—the same composed, unhurried courtesy he'd brought to everything since your arrival, not asking but not assuming.

"O-oh—sure" you said, and moved slightly to one side, which was less necessary than instinct.

He sat, and the proportional difference between you resolved itself into the particular familiar geometry—his shoulder several inches above yours, the reach of his legs considerably beyond yours on the stone—you looked very attentively at the flowering plants on the terrace below while you waited for something to happen with your heart rate.

He didn't say anything immediately. He sat with the garden the way you'd been sitting with it—looking at it, present with it, not filling the silence with anything, and after a moment you realised that the silence wasn't awkward, or wasn't only awkward, that there was something else in it too—the quality of someone who had decided to give you time and was genuinely doing it rather than waiting for you to notice they were waiting.

"The elanor," he said eventually, and indicated the low golden flowers on the terrace below. "They grow here because of the particular quality of the light in the valley. The same flower in open country above would bloom for three weeks. Here—" A brief, quiet pause. "—they have flowered in this terrace without interruption for longer than I know how to explain to someone whose measure of time is, perhaps different from mine."

You looked at the flowers. Small, star-shaped, a warm gold that caught the morning sun and held it. "That's—" you started, and then found the end of the sentence difficult, because every ending you reached for sounded either too much or too little. "Amazing" you settled on.

The faintest movement at the corner of his eyes. "It is," he agreed, without any irony in it.

He rose then, and walked to the next stone step, pausing there with a gesture that asked if you'd like to continue, and you got up and fell into step beside him, and you walked through the garden in this way — him a little ahead where the path was single-width, then beside you where it opened, pointing out things with the contained, considered enthusiasm of a man who had looked at this garden every day for several thousand years and still had specific things he wanted to show someone new.

A tree whose bark was white and smooth and warm to the touch—he stopped and let you press your hand flat against it without explaining why, and the warmth of it was faintly unbelievable, coming up through the bark like something living underneath the living wood. A fountain so small it occupied the hollow of a carved stone no larger than a cooking pot, the water cycling through it continuously from some source you couldn't see. A section of wall where something had grown directly through the stone—not breaking it, not forcing it apart, but incorporated so completely that the stone and the root had become one continuous material, the boundary between them impossible to find.

"This was a wall," he said, looking at the root-stone, "before the tree was planted. The tree was planted at the base of it to provide shade for the walkway above." He looked at it with the unhurried attention of someone doing the maths. "It took eleven hundred years for the root to reach the wall. It has been growing through it since."

You looked at the root-stone. At the place where two separate things had become one thing over eleven hundred years. "Did you plant it?" you asked.

"I did," he said. "I planted it for someone who has since gone from this world, and I have not had the heart to remove it."

You looked at the root-stone for another moment, and didn't say anything else about it, because there wasn't anything adequate, and he walked on and you walked with him.

"Mithrandir tells me he showed you something useful last evening."

You glanced at him. His expression carried its usual composed quality, but there was a very slight weight of something underneath it—not concern, something more like intent. "With the oil?" you asked.

"The oil," he confirmed. He looked at the path ahead. "It is old craft. Useful, in its context. He explained its application as a deterrent?"

"Yes," you said, and the word came out slightly careful, because the conversation had the quality of one leading somewhere, and you weren't entirely sure where.

"There is one further application he may not have mentioned," Elrond said. He stopped walking. Turned to face you, which at his height meant you were looking up at him at a angle, and the full, composed attention of his face was—considerable. Not intimidating, exactly. It was the opposite of threatening. But it was weighty, in the way that very old, very considered things were weighty, and you felt it in the same way you felt the falls—as something larger than the space it occupied.

"If the oil is present on your fingers rather than your palm," he said, "and the flame is produced with a flick directed outward—the angle of release carries it forward." He demonstrated the motion, slowly, without oil or fire, the flick of the wrist precise and short. "A small arc. Two to three feet, under most conditions. Sufficient, at close quarters, to interrupt an approach." He met your eyes. "You understand what I am describing."

"I—" You did understand. Very clearly. "Yes,"

"I offer it as information," he said. "Not as instruction. Not as an expectation." He held your gaze with that composed, ancient directness. "Do with it what you choose, as with all things. But you are travelling with this company into difficult country, and it seems better that you know rather than not know."

"I'm really," you said, and your voice came out slightly more strained than you'd intended, "really not looking to get involved in—in anymore fights. That's not—" You paused. "I'm not a fighter. I barely know which end of a dagger does what."

"The pointed end," Elrond said, with the particular quality of an extremely dry statement made with an entirely straight face.

You looked at him. He looked at you. Something crinkled, very slightly, at the outer corner of his eyes.

"Right," you said. "Yes. Obviously. I know that much."

"Then you know considerably more than nothing," he said, and resumed walking with the unhurried ease of a man who had made his point and saw no reason to labour it.

You followed, slightly wrong-footed, and was about to say something else—you weren't sure what—when the path curved around the end of the silver-tree stand and the terrace opened onto a broader level below, and the sight that greeted you stopped the sentence entirely.

The fountain was the largest feature of the garden — a broad, deep pool fed by a carved central structure of three rising tiers, a depiction of a ethereal elf woman pouring from a large bowl, was the upmost teir and each tier sending a sheet of water over its edge to the one below. It was clearly decorative. It was clearly meant to be looked at rather than used for anything.

However the company was using it for something else entirely, you took in the scene in the order that the brain absorbs information when it is genuinely not wanting to process what it is receiving, water first, because there was a great deal of it in motion. Then sound—splashing, shouting, laughter of the specific uninhibited volume that happens when people have forgotten they are guests somewhere. Then the detail.

Dori and Óin were in the pool itself, up to their considerable beards, arguing about something with the focused energy of a debate that had clearly been running since before they got in. Bombur occupied a significant portion of the pool's surface with the tranquil, philosophical composure of a dwarf who had found somewhere comfortable and was going to stay there. Nori was on the second tier, which he'd achieved by climbing the carved stone in a way that the carved stone had clearly not been intended to facilitate, and was in the process of pulling Bofur up after him by the arm.

Fíli and Kíli were on the top tier.

You took this in with the particular slow comprehension of someone whose eyes are receiving information they had not prepared for. They were on the top tier, and the top tier curved, and the water flowing over its edge made the curved stone slick, and they were—they were using that.

Taking a run-up and then launching themselves over the lip of the tier, down the curved stone face, and into the level below with the specific, gleeful, entirely committed energy of two dwarves who had independently arrived at the same conclusion about what this fountain was for and were absolutely correct that it was the most fun thing they'd done in weeks.

And to your horror all of them were completely, unabashedly naked.

Your turn was immediate and total, spine presenting itself to the fountain with the speed of someone executing a decision before the thinking part of the brain has finished formulating it, and you were staring at the silver-barked trees with your hands over your eyes and a very hot face.

"I am so sorry," you said, to Lord Elrond, who was standing beside you and whose expression you had not seen but could feel the quality of from approximately three feet away. "I am so genuinely sorry, this is—I had absolutely no idea they were—"

"So it would seem"

His voice was extremely flat, with a quality underneath the flatness that was doing the work of a very long and very comprehensive sentence that he had decided, with considerable self-restraint, not to say aloud. You could feel him looking at the fountain. You kept your eyes on the trees.

Behind you, Kíli crested the lip of the top tier and launched himself down with a sound of pure, uncomplicated delight.

"Nearly done!" called Balin's voice, from somewhere in the fountain, and you identified from the direction of it that Balin was not, in fact, standing outside the fountain supervising.

Balin was also in the fountain, up to his neck, looking extremely dignified regardless, which was possibly the most Balin thing he had ever done. "Give us ten minutes Lassie, You can have the next bath!"

You closed your eyes.

"I'm going to go—" you said, to Lord Elrond, to the silver-barked trees, to the general ambient beauty of Rivendell and its extremely thorough violation of it by thirteen dwarves. "I'm going to just—I'm going to excuse myself."

"I think that would be best," said Lord Elrond.

"I'm sorry," you said again, already moving, already taking the path back up toward the upper terrace at a speed that was not running but contained the aspiration of running. "I'm so very, very sorry."

Elrond said nothing further. You did not look back.

From the fountain, Fíli and Kíli completed another run in tandem, judging from the twin splashes, and someone—Nori, probably—made a sound of enthusiastic competitive assessment.

You made it to the garden and sat down on the first available bench, to the symphony of a loud crack and a yelp from a dwarf who had been slapped by a towel, or whatever passed for a towel in this world, you pressed both hands over your face and stayed there for some time.

In the private study that looked out over the courtyard above the garden, Lord Elrond set his hands behind his back and looked at Gandalf, who was engaged in the business of his pipe with the composed ease of a man who had recently removed himself from the scene below with considerable foresight.

"The dwarves," Elrond said.

"Yes," Gandalf replied without looking up from his pipe.

"In the fountain."

"Indeed."

A silence of considerable duration.

"The carved figure on it represents the lady of first age," Elrond said. "It was designed by Celebrimbor."

"She appears to be unharmed," Gandalf offered.

Elrond looked at him with the patient weariness of a host long accustomed to the wizards ways, and had made his peace with it thousands of years ago. He let the fountain matter settle where it had settled and turned, with the deliberate shift of someone moving from one subject to something that had been waiting, to the point he'd actually come to discuss.

"The young woman," he said.

Gandalf's expression did not change visibly. "What of her."

"I have been in her presence twice now," Elrond said, and his voice had changed—the dry quality gone, replaced with something more careful. "At dinner yesterday. In the garden this morning." He paused, and the pause had the shape of a man selecting words with precision. "Mithrandir. She has no Fëa."

The study was quiet. Outside, distantly, the sound of the falls.

"Or none that can be distinguished," Elrond amended "Which is strange enough in itself. Every child of Ilúvatar bears that within them, however faint. The beasts, the trees of the wood, even the stones of the earth hold something of their being. But she—" He stopped. "There is a presence, a shape where her fëa should be. Yet the fëa itself—" He met Gandalf’s eyes directly. "In all my years I have not encountered its like.

Gandalf was silent for a time, turning the bowl of his pipe slowly in his hands. "I know," he said at last.

"You knew?"

"I know," Gandalf repeated, and the distinction was not lost on Elrond, who waited.

"She is no threat," Gandalf continued before Elrond could press further. "Of that I am certain. Had I any doubt, I would not have suffered her to walk free among us, nor taught her to wield fire, which might i add you completed this morning."

Elrond’s gaze sharpened. "You speak with great confidence Mithrandir."

"And you speak as one who has forgotten that the Ilúvatar is wiser and stranger than even the Ainur first understood," Gandalf returned, though there was no heat in his voice—only the steady weight of long thought.

"She is not of the Children as we know them. That much is clear. Yet I have watched her. She carries no shadow of our enemy. If anything, there is in her a quality that we have long lacked, a perspective unburdened by the long grief of the ages. She may yet prove a good influence, Elrond. Perhaps even a necessary one."

Elrond regarded him for a long moment, the ancient weight of his counsel turning behind his eyes he exhaled, a sound almost like surrender, though not quite.

Elrond studied him for a long moment. "She is no threat," he said again. It was not a question.

"None," Gandalf answered. "Of that I assure you."

Elrond said nothing further. Outside, Balin's voice rose in a firm, affectionate directive toward Kíli, and the splashing finally stopped.

That night, the company arranged itself for sleep in the alcove with all its usual comfortable chaos—bedrolls in every direction, boots removed and placed with varying degrees of care, the particular symphony of wind-down that thirteen dwarves a hobbit and one human produced when they were tired and fed and relatively warm, which was a symphony with several sub-movements including argument about optimal sleeping arrangements and Dwalin's preliminary snoring, which began before he was technically asleep.

Ori was crouched near the centre of the alcove, attempting to start a fire.

You noticed, in passing, that the materials he was attempting to start it with appeared to include a section of what had, until recently, been a spindle-backed chair.

You did not comment on this. You had learned when to comment on things.

You crouched beside Ori, who looked at you with the slightly embarrassed expression of someone who has been struggling with a task for longer than he'd like to admit in front of an audience. He'd managed kindling—the chair contributed generously in this department—but the catch wasn't happening, the small pile of shredded wood not finding the spark it needed.

"Can I try?" you said.

Ori sat back. Looked at you with the open, uncomplicated attention he brought to most things. "Can you—?"

You reached into the pocket at the side seam of your dress and produced the vial of oil. Uncorked it. Tilted it carefully over the tips of your right hand's fingers, a small quantity, enough to coat the pads without excess. Corked it. Set it back in your pocket.

You positioned your hand above the kindling, fingers pointed downward toward the driest part of the pile, and thought about what Elrond had told you that morning—the angle of the wrist, the direction of the motion rather than the snap, the release rather than the ignition.

You flicked.

The flame came off your fingertips in a small, bright arc—barely a foot, a generous flicker rather than a serious throw, but it landed exactly where it needed to land, in the dry heart of the kindling, and the catch was immediate, the fire finding its hold and beginning its careful, certain climb through the pile with the satisfaction of something that had been waiting for exactly the right conditions.

The sound that came from the company was—a lot.

Cheering was perhaps too organised a word for what occurred, but it was in the same territory—a burst of noise, spontaneous and genuine, the specific blend of startled and delighted that you'd learned was one of the few responses that could produce genuine unanimity in a company of thirteen dwarves with strong individual opinions about most things.

Bofur said something enthusiastic in Khuzdul that you didn't catch, Glóin thumped the floor once with an open hand.

Kíli made a sound that was most accurately described as a whoop.

Even Dwalin, who was already three-quarters of the way to sleep, opened one eye and looked at the fire with an expression that on anyone else's face would have been simple approval but on Dwalin's face required significantly more interpretive work.

The fire popped and caught on a larger piece of the former chair, and the alcove filled with warm light.

Ori was looking at you with wide eyes and the expression of someone recalibrating several things simultaneously. "Where did you—how did you—"

"Radagast," you said, which seemed to answer most questions from the company, and settled yourself on your bedroll while the fire established itself and the company's collective excitement wound back down into its comfortable, sleepy baseline.

The last thing you saw, before you closed your eyes, was Balin across the hall watching you with the specific, private expression of a very proud dwarf.

Sleep didn't find you, It came near—the familiar teasing proximity of it, close enough to feel the weight of it—and then your chest would shift with some unnamed thing, and you'd be staring at the ceiling again, and the ceiling offered nothing useful.

After the third attempt you gave up, wrapped your blanket around your shoulders, and picked your way with careful feet over Ori's legs and around the considerable territory of Dwalin's bedroll, and out into the cooler air of Rivendell's open corridors.

You walked without direction. The corridors breathed with the particular night time quality of the valley—cool, and faintly luminescent, the pale stone holding the day's light in a soft ambient glow that was just enough to walk by. The falls were louder in the dark, or seemed to be, the way all water sounds larger when the visual world has contracted.

You took a passage you hadn't taken before, curiosity rather than intent, and it deposited you into a small garden—a different one from the morning's terraces, more enclosed, three walls of carved stone and one open side facing the valley, a scattering of the low golden flowers and a pair of stone benches set at an angle to each other near the open side.

Thorin was on one of them, He was not looking at the valley, He was looking at his hands, forearms on his thighs, and the quality of it was the particular private look of a person who has come outside to think and has not yet finished thinking, and would probably have preferred not to be found.

He heard you—you'd never once managed to approach Thorin without him knowing you were coming before you arrived. His head turned slightly, not fully, orienting.

You hesitated at the garden entrance.

"Sorry," you said. "I didn't know anyone was here. I'll go."

"Sit down," he said, not warmly, but not unwelcoming. The flat, direct shorthand of a man who'd decided and saw no reason to elaborate.

You came into the garden and sat on the other bench, angling yourself so you were facing him across the narrow space between them rather than beside him, your blanket pulled around your shoulders. The valley opened behind him, the falls audible and the pale stone luminescent in the dark.

He looked at you. You looked at him.

"You can't sleep ?" You asked

"No," he cast his eyes around the valley. "Not in this place of—Elves."

"I couldnt either," you said. "Mostly due to Dwalin's one man orchestra."

Thorin huffed what was the beingings of a laugh, in the tone he used for statements that were doing double duty as acknowledgements.

You fell into a silence, one that was comfortable in the way that silences between people who had accumulated enough shared space became comfortable—not requiring filling, not requiring explanation.

"Could I ask something?"

"You can ask." He murmured without lifting his eyes.

You looked at the golden flowers catching the ambient glow from the stone. Your hands tightened slightly around the blanket.

"What was it like? The mountain." You kept your voice careful and quiet.

He was still for a moment. Then he turned his head and looked at you, and the expression on his face was something you'd seen in fragments but not assembled—a quality that wasn't quite guarded and wasn't quite open, sitting in the space between.

"Erebor," he said. Not a correction, exactly. The way you'd say a name to someone who'd been using a nickname—gently, establishing the right thing. "The Lonely Mountain. It has a name."

"Erebor," you said, and tried to say it the way he had—the weight of it in the first syllable, the slight roll on the r.

Something in his face shifted at hearing it said. Not dramatically. A small thing, privately noted. "Your getting better," he said, in the tone he used for lessons.

"Could you tell me about Erebor, please." you said again.

He was still for a moment in the way that meant he was going somewhere in his memory. In the pale glow of the stone he looked like something from an old painting—all strong line and stillness, and something underneath the stillness that moved.

"Erebor," he said, and the word landed with all its weight. He looked at the valley for a long moment. "It felt like—" He stopped. Considered.

"You cannot understand the scale of it until you have stood inside it. The great hall alone—the pillars are two hundred feet. Perhaps more."

You looked at the carved arch at the garden entrance, the tallest thing visible from where you sat. "Higher than that?"

Thorin looked at the arch. Something moved briefly at the corner of his mouth—not with humour, but somewhere close. "That," he said, "is decorative stonework— it's competent."

"The pillars of Erebor are load-bearing. Each one the width of six dwarves standing shoulder to shoulder, carved from the living rock of the mountain itself, not placed—revealed. The stone is always there. The craft is in finding what was already inside it." He paused.

"There is no comparison."

"I didn't mean to—"

"You did not offend me," he said, and the directness of it was its own kind of reassurance. "You have not seen it. There is no frame for it in what you have seen." He looked at his hands again, briefly. "I am trying to give you one."

You pulled the blanket tighter around yourself "What did it feel like? Being inside something that big?"

He didn't answer immediately, and you'd learned that Thorin's silences had their own grammar—some of them were refusals and some of them were consideration and some of them were the particular quiet of someone going somewhere in their memory that they didn't visit casually.

This one was the last kind.

"Warm," he said, finally. "The deep halls, the ones cut furthest in—there is a quality of stone that has never seen daylight. It holds differently. A particular temperature. A particular quiet." His voice had shifted, very subtly, from the measured register he kept for most things to something with less distance in it, the careful control of it loosened by a fraction by the dark and the late hour and the valley below.

"My grandfather would take me—into the deep halls when I was still young enough to be carried. He said you could hear the mountain breathing."

"Can you?" you said.

"I don't know if it was the mountain or the forges below," Thorin said. "There were always forges lit, in the deep levels. The vibration came up through the stone. When you lay your hand flat against the floor—" He stopped. "You could feel it."

You looked at him in the dark, at the profile of him against the pale luminescence of the valley—the line of his jaw, the particular set of his shoulders when he was not being held in the tension of responsibility, which was different from his ordinary posture and rarely visible.

"The foundries were the heart of it," he said, and the word heart sat differently in his voice than any of the others, heavier, with a directness that the rest of the description had been building toward without you realising. "The craft that came out of them—armour, weapons, jewellery, mechanisms—things that the world had not seen before and has not seen since. Not because the skill is gone." He looked at the valley.

"The skill is in this company. In Fíli and Kíli who will surpass even what we can do, given time. In Dwalin, in Bifur, in all of them." A pause. "The craft is not gone. What is gone is the mountain to practise it in. The space of it. The stone beneath your feet that is your own."

He stopped talking. The falls went on below, indifferent and continuous.

You moved, without deciding to, settling yourself sideways on the bench so you could sit on it properly, your knees came up naturally, and you rested your chin on them, your arms wrapped around your shins, and looked at Thorin from this new angle.

He glanced at you. At the way you'd arranged yourself. Something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite anything.

"Go on," you said.

He looked at you for a moment. The particular expression he had—the one he'd been restricting since the beginning, that wasn't warm exactly but had something underneath the not-warmth that was warmer than anything he'd have named—and then looked back at the valley, and went on.

He told you about the market that ran through the eastern passage, the one where merchants came from three directions and the noise of it was audible two levels above. He told you about the library his grandfather had maintained in the upper halls, maps and records going back to the founding, about his grandfather's handwriting and his great-grandfather's before that. He told you about the gardens of carved crystal in the deep levels, where the light of the foundries below caught in the crystal faces and threw colours across the stone walls that had no equivalent aboveground—colours, he said, that had no names in any surface language, that existed only in that specific quality of reflected light in that specific place.

His voice, as he talked, went through a change that was slow and specific—not toward something soft, exactly, but toward something less contained. The careful guard that he maintained over most of what he said, the deliberate management of what reached the surface, relaxed by degrees, the way a fist can relax one finger at a time, until what was left was something that had the quality of the thing underneath rather than the thing he used to manage it.

He was telling you about the mountain, and what he was also telling you was what it had cost him to leave it and how much of himself was still there, waiting, and he wasn't saying any of that, and you still heard all of it.

Then the details, arriving in pieces as you walked. The archways running column to column like a sentence repeated in stone. The way trees grew into and through sections of the architecture rather than being arranged around it—roots following wall lines, branches threading past open windows, everything growing together over centuries into something that was entirely, specifically itself. The sound of voices from somewhere above, carrying in that language you couldn't follow, liquid and careful, each word placed with the deliberate precision of someone who had never been in a hurry and saw no reason to start.

You walked through all of it with your right hand curled inward, fingers toward your palm. The black blood had dried. Balin had done what he could before you'd come down into the valley—his broad thumb working in circles across your knuckles with the brisk, matter-of-fact care he brought to most things—but it had found the places under your nails and between your fingers where dried blood settles in and stays, and what remained was a dark stain along the edges of your hand that had resisted the cloth and was simply going to have to wait for something more thorough.

You walked with your right hand curled, and tried to look at Rivendell, and almost mostly managed it.

Lindir led the company through the open corridors at a pace measured precisely to be neither hurrying nor dawdling, his hands folded before him, his expression the composed, gracious neutrality of someone who was very good at being a host and considered it a matter of personal pride to remain so regardless of circumstance. The corridors opened on one side to the valley below—a drop of open air and the falls—and the rooms beyond the doors you passed were light and high-ceilinged and smelled of flora and old, clean stone.

He stopped before a set of open doorways and turned to the company with a small, measured gesture inward with his hand. "These rooms have been prepared. I hope they will be to your comfort."

There was a pause, Thorin walked past the door without looking at it.

You looked at the rooms. Looked at the beds—which were, to be fair, extremely good looking beds the kind of bed that announced its own quality through sheer visible softness. Looked at Lindir. Then gave your best attempt at what you hoped was a apologetic smile.

Dwalin looked at the rooms. Made a sound that was not a word.

Lindir's hand, still extended toward the open doorway, remained exactly where it was for a moment. His face remained exactly where it was as well—composed, attentive, showing nothing—while every other muscle involved in the gesture of welcome underwent a very small and very controlled adjustment.

"These rooms?" he tried a little louder.

"We will take the alcove," Thorin said, already moving further up the passage.

"The—" Lindir looked at the alcove. At the open stone floor. At the beds visible through the separate doorways. Lindir's extended hand, moved very slightly—a brief, fractional adjustment of the fingers that he stilled immediately. "I—I beg your pardon?"

"The alcove," Thorin said. "The company sleeps together. We will take the alcove."

"Yes. Of course." Lindir replied after a brief pause in which something worked very quietly behind his eyes. "Shall I have—"

"We have our bedrolls Lad" Dwalin said, passing him.

"Naturally," Lindir said.

He turned and walked back along the corridor with the same measured pace he'd arrived with, and the only indication that the last thirty seconds had affected him in any way was the precise, slightly-too-deliberate quality of the fold of his hands.

You were standing in the middle of the company with Balin at your side, Lindir had glanced toward you as the company began moving—a look that carried the specific polite inquiry of a host wondering whether every member of the group had the same preferences—when Balin's hand appeared at your elbow — not grabbing, not insistent, just present, redirecting you gently sideways with the quiet authority of someone who had already made a decision about where you were going.

"This way, Kiyanê" he said, steering you around Lindir in a half-circle that was deliberate yet so smooth and unhurried it barely registered as a steering at all.

"I was just going to—wait, I dont know that word ?"

"Aye," Balin said clearing his throat, and kept walking "Just an old word. Slipped out.”

“What does it mean?”

“Means you ought to watch your step, Lass” Balin said with a pleasant redirecting you imagined he'd employed before to much younger people, ushering you forward faster, as if speed alone was enough to erase your question.

You looked back at Lindir, who was still watching the last of the dwarves file past him into the alcove with an expression that was doing significant structural work, and then to where Fíli and Kíli had already begun the optimistic business of identifying the best spots on the stone floor.

The dinner invitation arrived through Lindir, who delivered it at the alcoves archway with the composed dignity of a elf who had already had an instructive afternoon and was approaching the remainder of the evening with managed expectations.

"Lord Elrond extends invitation to the company," he said, to the alcove in general, "to dine with him this evening on the open terrace. It would be—" A brief pause. "He would be honoured by your company."

Silence from the alcove. Several dwarves exchanged glances.

"There'll be food?" Bombur asked.

"Quite a great deal of it," Lindir said.

"We accept,"

Gandalf closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and looked at Lindir with the expression of a man offering a wordless apology on behalf of a situation he had created and was responsible for. Lindir received it with a fractional tilt of the head and withdrew.

The terrace opened onto the valley—the falls audible below, the amber light of early evening falling across long tables set with a grace that the company regarded with varying degrees of suspicion and appetite. Elvish lanterns burned at intervals, throwing warm light across the excellent arrangements of food that Bombur had zeroed in on immediately upon arrival and was now orbiting with professional focus.

Elrond was already present, standing at the head table with the ease of someone entirely at home in their own hall, and as the company arranged itself he gestured to the chairs at his table with a warmth that was neither theatrical nor forced.

"Please," he said. "Welcome."

Thorin moved toward the round head table. Glanced back at you, once, as he moved through the crowd of settling dwarves, and then he stepped slightly backwards—and turned—extended his hand toward you, not asking, not uncertain, simply the presentation of a possibility, his eyes on yours.

You looked at his hand.

You looked at your own, the dark stain still there along the crease lines, and something in your chest did a small, horrible flip of recognition before you curled your hand back—not sharply, just a quiet withdrawal, your fingers folding further inward, your eyes going sideways.

"I-I should sit with Balin," you said, very quietly.

A beat. Brief. Thorin lowered his hand without comment, turned, and took his seat with the same composure he brought to everything, and said nothing further about it.

You went to where Balin and Dwalin had already established their position at one of the side tables, which were lower than the head table and built, you understood immediately for dwarvish proportions. You stood beside your stool for a moment doing the arithmetic, then sat down on it.

Your knee was approximately at the table's edge, you looked at Balin, who looked at the table, who looked at you, who looked back at the table. "Ah," he said.

"Yes,"

You picked up your stool, moved it entirely beneath the table, and sat cross-legged on the floor of the terrace instead, which put you at something approaching functional table height, if a little lower then everyone else and required no further discussion. Dwalin, next to you, looked down at this arrangement. Then forward at the table. Then back down at you.

"Comfortable?" He asked with a smirk.

"It's adaptable," you chuckled nudging him with your shoulder "I've been learning from the best"

"Aye," he said, and served himself.

Balin, to your right, passed you the bread.

"What is this," said Glóin, looking at the dish in front of him with the expression of a man confronting something he suspected of being nutritionally inadequate.

"It's a salad, I think," Bilbo said, from the next seat.

"It's leaves," Glóin said.

"Well, yes, partly, but there are also—"

"I'm not eating leaves, where's the meat ?" Glóin said, with finality, and looked around for something else.

"It's very good," said Bilbo, who was already on his second helping and had positioned himself at a dwarvish table with the resigned expertise of a hobbit who had learned, over the journey, that proximity to dwarves at mealtimes was either an advantage or a disaster, and had decided to take his chances.

"It's leaves dressed with oil," Dori said, from further down, lifting a small piece of something with his fork and examining it. "Which is an improvement, but—"

"There are mushrooms," Ori offered, helpfully. "In the thing at the end."

"Mushrooms in what?"

"The—the grainy thing. With the green bits."

"What grain?"

"Glóin," said Balin, mildly.

"I'm just asking what grain."

"It's very good grain," said Bilbo.

"You've said that about everything."

"Because everything is very good, if you'd only—"

Bombur, who had been silent through all of this, had eaten approximately twice what anyone else had managed and was now applying himself to a third serving of the herb grain with the focused, reverent concentration of a dwarf having a genuine culinary experience and declining to be interrupted by conversation.

You ate your own portion in the smaller, more measured way that hadn't left you, taking actual bites rather than the dwarvish approach of making meaningful progress, and felt Bofur glance at you from down the table and then look deliberately away with the expression of a man who had made a decision not to comment on it this time.

"You eat like you're being watched," Dwalin said, beside you.

"I eat like someone raised me to have table manners," you said.

"Raised well," Balin said, with the particular approval of a dwarf who had, himself, very good table manners, and considered this worth noting.

"Raised to use a fork," you agreed, "which feels suddenly very relevant."

Kíli had been quiet for most of the first course, which was unusual enough that Fíli had noticed it and was now watching his brother with the patient, expectant attention of someone who knew something was coming.

Kíli's eyes had been moving at intervals to a point somewhere past Fíli's shoulder. Fíli did not look. He served himself more of the grain with the focused calm of a man waiting for an inevitable thing to arrive in its own time.

The Elf playing harp at the edge of the terrace had long, dark hair, arranged simply, and played with the specific unhurried quality of someone for whom music was as natural as breathing.

Kíli's posture shifted. A small, deliberate adjustment toward the harp player. And then, with the particular calibrated casualness of a dwarf who thought he was being sauve, he winked.

The harp player did not look up. The music continued without interruption.

Kíli maintained his expression for approximately three more seconds before becoming aware, with the particular awareness that arrives when something large and solid is suddenly nearby, of Dwalin.

Dwalin was looking at him with the flat, utterly unimpressed regard of a man who had seen everything and was not surprised by this specifically.

Kíli straightened. Cleared his throat. "I can't say I fancy Elf-maids myself," he said, with the conversational ease of a person introducing a topic that had definitely not just been prompted by anything.

Fíli, beside him, looked at his plate.

"No?" said Dwalin.

"Too thin," Kíli said. "They're all high cheekbones—and creamy skin"He picked up his fork and applied it to his plate with decisive energy. "Not enough facial hair for me they're all—it's all very— no."

"Although," Kíli jerked his chin in the direction of a ethereal musicain who had just entered the terrace "that one there—she's not bad."

"Mm," said Dwalin a twitch forming on the edges of his mouth.

"I'm just saying."

"Kíli," Dwalin said with a smirk that had reached maturity "That is not a Elf maid."

Kíli cleared his throat and ate a large portion of something with the expression of a man who hoped the ground would claim him.

You pressed the back of your hand to your mouth and said nothing.

"Something funny?" Kíli said, looking at you.

"Oh—absolutely not," you said.

"Good," he said.

"Im sure he's lovely," you offered.

Kíli pointed his fork at you. "Do not start"

Bofur hadn't eaten very well, which meant Bofur wasn't excatly happy, which meant Bofur decided to remedy the evening.

"Alright, lad's there's only one thing for it!" He exclaimed as he climbed a side table.

It did not start quietly—and by the second verse it had acquired significant volume. By the third, Bifur had found a cup to bang on the table in time, which was all the percussion required to bring in Bombur on the downbeat, and from there the song had its own momentum.

"There's an inn, there's an inn, there's a merry old inn," Bofur sang, with the committed delivery of a man who knew every word and intended to use them, "beneath an old grey hill—"

"And there they brew a beer so brown," Óin joined in, apparently knowing this song in the way dwarves apparently knew all songs, completely and immediately, "the Man in the Moon himself came down one night to drink his fill—"

"Does this seem like an appropriate—" Lindir said, appearing at the edge of the terrace with the expression of someone who had been given limited preparation time and was doing his best with it.

"The ostler has a tipsy cat," Bofur continued, undeterred, "that plays a five-stringed fiddle—"

"It's a very old song," Gandalf told Lindir, in the tone of a man offering context rather than an apology.

"I'm—yes, I recognise that," Lindir said, with a quality in his voice that suggested this recognition was not entirely comfortable. "It's just—"

"And up and up she swep' the room," sang the better part of the company, now, "and chased the dog to bed—"

At the head table, Elrond was watching the proceedings with the particular quality of attention that was also, you thought, something very close to concern masked as entertainment, though he'd clearly had centuries of practice at keeping the two things separated in his expression.

You were attempting to maintain a neutral face, which was undermined entirely when Ori—sweet, careful, sketchbook-Ori—joined in the chorus with the specific loud enthusiasm of a dwarf who had drunk something from a very tall Elvish cup and had not accounted for the potency of Elvish alcohol.

"He's doing very well," Bilbo said, beside you, watching Ori with the fond exasperation of a hobbit who had also encountered unexpectedly strong Elvish drink.

"He's—trying," you agreed.

The bread started somewhere around the fifth verse, and you were not entirely sure who threw first, though the trajectory of the first piece suggested Nori, and the velocity of the return suggested Dori had been waiting for an excuse, and from there the logic was as inevitable as it always was.

You ducked. The piece that had been heading toward you sailed past and caught Dwalin squarely in the side of the face.

Dwalin turned his head very slowly and looked at the direction it had come from.

The responsible dwarf was looking elsewhere with total conviction.

You pressed both hands over your face, and the sound that came out from behind them was not something you were going to describe as a laugh in any official capacity.

"You're smiling." Balin said, beside you with a grin of his own.

"I can't help smiling—"

"You could help it," Balin said "You choose not to."

This was accurate enough that you couldn't argue with it, and so you pressed your hands harder over your face and made a sound that Balin very charitably declined to categorise, while above the head table Lindir stood with the expression of a man doing something very difficult with his face and succeeding at it and Gandalf looked at the sky with the expression of a man who had set all of this in motion several months ago by knocking on a door in the Shire and had no one to blame for the consequences but himself, and found he didn't actually mind.

Later, when the company had returned to the alcove and the organised chaos of thirteen dwarves and a hobbit settling for the night had completed itself save for the grumbling, shuffling and the onset of Dwalin's snoring—which proved to be fully audible through Rivendell's open architecture, the falls providing no competition whatsoever—you slipped out to the carved overlook above the falls and sat alone with your legs dangling over the edge.

Below you, the water fell white and continuous from its shelf of rock, and the sound of it filled everything, which was what you'd wanted. Not silence. Silence left too much room.

Your right hand lay palm up in your lap.

The stain had faded with soap—you'd scrubbed it twice, efficiently, before dinner not that it had helped much—what remained was faint, a slight darkening in the crease lines of your fingers. You could still see it in the angle of the lantern light from the passage behind you, and you kept looking at it the way you couldn't stop pressing a bruise.

The rider had been wearing armour. You'd seen that much in the fraction of the moment before the momentum had carried everything forward. Armour meant a person who made choices. A person who had chosen to ride toward a company of travellers and had died when that company had fought back, which rather meant you, which meant your hand, which meant that rider had consequently died on the blade of someone who hadn't meant to do it and couldn't take it back.

The specific sound of blade sliding into flesh would be living in your chest at this particular depth for a while, and the question you kept arriving at, from every direction you approached it, was whether any accounting of the rider's death produced a result you could live with.

You weren't sure yet.

"You're not sleeping?" said Gandalf, from directly behind you.

You turned. He was there—materialised in the way Gandalf materialised, from the passage behind you, as though he'd been just out of sight and was now simply no longer bothering to be. You'd been listening, in a vague way, to the company, and so you hadn't jumped, which felt like progress.

"I don't think I can" you said.

"Mm." He settled himself beside you on the overlook with the care of someone whose knees had technically been the same age for several centuries and had still experienced a great deal of speed without the difficulty those centuries should provide. His staff leaned against a nearby stool and he looked down at the falls with the contemplative ease of someone who had looked at waterfalls for a very long time and continued to find them worthwhile.

"Bombur made something with the leftover bread," Gandalf offered.

"I'm not hungry," you said.

"No, I suppose you wouldn't be" Gandalf agreed. He looked at your hand, briefly, and then at the falls, and said nothing, and let the sound of the water fill the space between you.

"I keep thinking about the rider," you said.

He didn't try to redirect you. "I know."

"Is that—does it stop? That thing in your chest when you think about what you did?"

"It becomes managed," he said. "It takes its proper proportion, over time. It does not disappear." A pause. "The fact that it doesn't disappear is not a weakness."

"It doesn't feel like a strength," you scoffed.

"No," he agreed. "It rarely does, from inside it."

"I didn't even decide to do it the blade was there and it—" You made a gesture, causing your stomach to catch in that specific way that meant dinner might vist the conversation and stopped.

"Yes," Gandalf said. "Yet here you sit."

Gandalf reached into his robes and produced his pipe, and began packing in his usual unhurried ritual you'd watched him perform a dozen times, and the smell of it came over you warm and familiar, old and sweet, and you let the silence run for a while.

"The fact that you are here, and that you are thinking about it, which is what people of conscience do after difficult things. The thinking means the outcome preserved the right being."

You looked at the falls. At your hand. The crease lines.

"Radagast gave you something," he said, when the pipe was almost finished, in the specific tone of a person raising a topic they've been waiting to raise.

"Oil," You found it in the pocket at your side seam—a detail of the dress you'd discovered with genuine delight, a small sewn pocket that you'd been using as a makeshift bag ever since—and held it up. Small, dark glass, stopped with a cork, the liquid inside clear and slightly viscous. "He didn't quite finish saying what it is. Radagast is kind of—well—you know."

"Mmm," Gandalf said, with the warmth of someone noting a well-loved characteristic. Gandalf looked at it in your hand with an expression that managed to be both entirely unsurprised and privately delighted at the same time, the expression of someone who has arranged for a thing to be somewhere and is watching it arrive in exactly the right place.

"If I may?" he said, and you handed it to him.

He turned it in his fingers. Uncorked it carefully and tilted it over his own palm, letting a thin stream of oil cross the skin from below his index finger to just below his thumb, a specific, deliberate line, then across the centre of his palm in a slow arc. He recorked the vial and handed it back.

He held his palm up and looked at the oil glistening across it in the lantern light. Then, with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who has decided to show you something and is going to show it properly, he positioned his thumb to his finger and snapped.

The flame was immediate. Not tentative—a full, confident bloom of fire that caught along the line of oil and settled into the centre of his palm with the composed familiarity of something that knew exactly where it was. Bright, warm, orange-white at the core and paler at the edges, throwing moving light up across Gandalf's face.

You made a sound.

"Yes," Gandalf said, looking at the flame in his palm with the mild satisfaction of a man who has achieved the expected result through reliable means.

Then he rolled his wrist, and the flame followed the line of oil, sliding along his palm in a slow arc, steady and self-contained, and held there. He looked at you over the top of it with a very mischevious expression.

"Gandalf?"

"Mm."

"Are you—" You watched the flame move again, following another deliberate tilt of his hand. "Are you doing tricks?"

"I'm demonstrating," he said, with perfect composure, tilting his hand again so the flame tracked back the other way along his palm. It followed the oil exactly, burning cleanly, maintaining its height through the movement with the kind of obedient consistency that suggested the relationship between this fire and the hand it was sitting in was one of long familiarity.

He caught your expression, and something in his own shifted—the corner of his mouth, very slightly, the particular micro-expression of Gandalf being amused at something and declining to confirm it.

He brought his other hand up alongside the first, held his palms together for a moment, and then separated them slowly, and the flame divided between them with a smoothness that had no business being that neat, sitting in both palms now, smaller and lower but burning steadily in each hand, and he held both out toward you and raised his eyebrows at you over the top of them like a question.

"Okay," you said, watching the two small flames, "that is—your showing off."

"A very old trick," Gandalf said, closing both hands together and separating them again, and the flame reunited as though it had never been divided, sitting in his right palm exactly as it had started, complete and steady. "Radagast's recipe is particular. Brief contact produces no lasting harm to the wielder." He looked at you. "Would you like to try?"

You looked at his palm. At the flame. At the vial in your hand. "On my actual hand."

"On your actual hand."

You uncorked the vial and tilted it over your own palm, watching the oil settle in a line across the centre of it — less certain with the angle than Gandalf had been, more of it landing slightly off-centre, but enough, the viscous clear liquid sitting in the whorls of your fingerprints and catching the lantern light the same way.

You recorked the vial. Held your palm up. Positioned your thumb and finger.

"Confidence matters more than force."

You snapped.

Nothing. A faint warmth where your fingers had contacted each other, a ghost of friction, no flame.

"Perhaps a little quicker," Gandalf said.

You tried again. A flicker—there for a half-second, a pale catch of something that extinguished before it fully arrived.

"You're anticipating the flame" Gandalf said. "There is no need to pull back."

You set your jaw. Positioned again. Snapped with the sharp, total, committed completion of someone who had decided they were going to do the thing.

The flame caught.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

Small—considerably smaller than Gandalf's, lower to the surface of your palm, with the tentative quality of something that wasn't entirely sure of its welcome—but there. A real flame, actual fire, burning in the centre of your hand with a warmth that was not pain, the heat of a candle held close, and the light of it threw moving shadows up across your wrist and the underside of your arm and you looked at it and felt something very strange happen in your chest that was almost entirely the opposite of what the last several hours had felt like.

"There," Gandalf said, quietly.

You watched the flame. It moved slightly with your breathing, bending toward you on the inhale and away on the exhale, and you took a careful, wondering breath and watched it bend, and took another, and it bent again.

"In the context of a fight," Gandalf said, after a moment, returning to something practical, "a sudden flame at close quarters produces a moment. A distraction. A moment of surprise in the dark, especially, is often sufficient for distance."

"Or for calling for help," you said, still watching the flame.

"Or for that," he agreed. "The light carries."

You turned your hand very slightly, the way you'd watched him do, and the flame followed the oil, sliding a small distance across your palm and holding there, and you made an involuntary sound of surprise and delight that you would have been embarrassed about if there'd been anyone else around.

"Blow it out," Gandalf said, "before it burns down to bare skin."

You blew it out, gently, and the surface darkened and went still, and a thin thread of smoke rose from your palm in the lantern light, and the warmth remained for a moment after, and you sat with your hand open and looked at where the flame had been.

"Why does my life deserve to be 'preserved'," you said quietly.

Your fingers made small quotation marks in the air. Gandalf watched this with the mild interest of someone who had simply accepted that as a feature of conversation with you.

"More than anyone else's," you said. "The rider—" You stopped. "Why should I be here when he is not."

Gandalf looked at you. Not at the falls, not at the overlook, directly at you, with the full undivided weight of that very old attention.

"The fact that you are asking the question," he said, "is answer enough."

"That's—" You stopped. "That's not actually—"

"It isn't a deflection," he said, before you could get there. He held your gaze steadily. "Someone who does not value life does not ask that question. They conduct a different accounting entirely. They do not sit on an overlook in the dark and ask whether they deserved the result of a altercation they had no hand in starting." A pause, the falls going on below you both. "The fact that the question costs you something—that is not a burden. It is the thing that means you are the kind of person worth the difficulty of keeping."

You were quiet for a long moment.

The sound of the falls filled the silence, layered and continuous. The lantern light moved slightly in the air, and the pale stone of Rivendell caught it and gave it back, and the valley sat in its amber, unhurried dusk the way it had apparently been sitting for a very long time and intended to go on sitting for considerably longer.

"That's either very wise or completely circular," you said.

"I find, it is frequently both."

You huffed a breath that was definitely a laugh and were not going to confirm this, and the cold thing in your chest, which had been sitting there since the Warg and the rider and the black blood, shifted — not gone, not fixed, but shifted, the way a weight shifts when someone adjusts how it's sitting rather than taking it away, which is sometimes the most that's available, and is enough.

You looked at the vial in your hand. At your palm.

"Can I light it again?" you asked.

"As many times as you like," Gandalf said, reaching his pipe back up to his lips. "There's a reasonable quantity in the vial. Radagast was generous."

You tilted the oil onto your palm again. Positioned your fingers. Thought about completion.

The flame came faster this time, more certain of itself, with none of the preliminary hesitation—it caught and held and sat in your palm like something that had always been there and was simply waiting to be called.

It wasn't uncomfortable—if anything it was more comfortable than the business casual you'd been living in since your arrival, the fabric soft and broken-in, the belt giving you somewhere to hook the dagger that actually made practical sense. But you were aware of it in a way you hadn't been aware of your own clothes, the hem doing things at your calves that trousers didn't, the embroidered cuffs catching on things you rode past. You'd caught the skirt on a bramble twice already this morning and freed it both times with the specific irritation of someone still recalibrating a new spatial awareness.

"Third time," Bofur said, cheerfully, from just behind you, watching you unhook the hem from another branch with focused concentration.

"I'm aware, thank you."

"There's a trick to it," he offered, with a earnest chuckle. "You sort of—gather it here, at the front of your saddle, when you're moving through—" He mimed a gesture that you watched carefully and attempted to replicate, and the next few minutes of were slightly smoother, which you counted as a genuine victory.

"How does a dwarf lord come to know about a woman's dress Bofur?" You teased, with a raised brow.

"I've spent a time or two around a ladies skirt," he winked at you his grin turning wolfish "But never you mind about that, Lass."

The forest was dense, old growth pressing close on both sides of the path, the light coming through in long, filtered bars that made everything look a little like a painting. It was beautiful in a way you'd stopped being surprised by—this world was relentlessly, exhaustingly beautiful, and you'd given up expecting it to let up about it.

Thorin called a halt at the edge of what looked like a potential clearing, and the company spread out to assess it with the practiced efficiency of a group that had made this assessment many times.

"There's a stream," Kíli reported back, from somewhere ahead, his voice carrying clean through the trees. "Good one. Looks clean."

That was all that was needed. The company moved toward it with a collective, purposeful ease, and within the space of half an hour the clearing had been converted into something resembling an organised rest stop—ponies tethered in the shade, several dwarves crouched at the stream's edge filling waterskins, Óin already taking inventory of the medical kit with focused attention.

You gathered up a few things that needed washing with the same quiet, practical competence you'd been building into the daily rhythm of travel, and found a flat rock at the stream's edge that was good for the purpose, and got to work alongside Ori, who had brought a considerably more impressive volume of laundry than your own and seemed to consider the whole process a rather boring chore.

A single sharp howl rose from somewhere in the trees to the east—not long, not sustained, just one clean note that split the afternoon air like something thrown in a pool of still water—every head in the clearing snapped up at the same instant. The kind of total, collective stillness that wasn't calm at all. Every body in the company had gone tight and ready, and even you, who didn't yet have the vocabulary for what that sound meant, felt the air change.

"That's—what is that ?" Bilbo's voice had gone high and thin. He was standing shin-deep in the water with his waterskin still in his hands, frozen. "That's a wolf, isn't it—are there wolves out there?"

"No." Dwalin's voice was flat and immediate. He was already moving, axes out, the metal catching the filtered light. His eyes swept the treeline in a single, rapid arc. "That is not a wolf."

"What is it?" you asked, and the way every face in the company swung briefly to you—just briefly, just a flicker, before swinging back to the treeline—told you the answer was something you were about to experience rather than be told.

"Wargs." Thorin's voice cut across the clearing, low and controlled and carrying the specific authority of a man issuing orders in a situation he has been in before and survived. "Everyone up. Now. Move."

No one hesitated. Not one of them. The camp dissolved in seconds—packs grabbed or abandoned by some rapid tiarge, weapons up, the formation of the company tightening and consolidating with the practiced compression of a group that had lived this and lived it enough times that the motion was now bone-deep. The washing fell from your hands as you scrambled to your feet, heart lurching into a rhythm it had no business being at, and Bilbo was suddenly beside you, one hand briefly touching your elbow—not grabbing, just contact, just confirmation that he was there—and then they were moving and you were moving with them.

The second howl came from the north.

Closer.

And then a third, from what sounded almost directly overhead, and you looked up—you looked up at the rocky outcrop that bordered the clearing's eastern edge, twenty feet of loose stone and scrub—and it was there.

Your brain tried, for one awful, lurching second, to give it a shape it recognised. A dog ? some part of you suggested, grasping at something familiar. Just a very large—a very, very—

It wasn't a dog.

It was the size of a large horse, mottled black-brown and massive, its legs built wrong for a dog, too long, too angled, the joints moving with a force that made your stomach turn over. Its head was enormous, jaw hanging open, and the teeth it showed were not dog teeth—they were too many, too long, stained dark at the roots, and the saliva that swung from its jaw caught the light in thick, ropey strings.

Its eyes were pale and fixed and there was nothing behind them that you could identify as anything other than appetite. A ridge of coarse, matted fur ran up its spine and stood raised now, and the sound that came from its chest was not a howl, it was a continuous, rolling growl that you felt in your back teeth.

There was a hunched figure on its back. You registered that too—armoured, broad, gripping the Warg's scruff with a grey-green hand, a crude blade already drawn— and your brain tried to process the totality of it and simply failed, the information arriving faster than it could be organised.

"Three of them!" Kíli's voice, from somewhere to your right. "On the East side."

Three.

There were three more.

The one on the rocks had locked its pale eyes onto the clearing and was already crouching, haunches gathering, and the sound that came from it deepened into something that had nothing to do with communication and everything to do with intent.

"Run!" Thorin yelled.

You ran.

The company moved fast—faster than you'd expected, faster than their build suggested, dwarves built for endurance rather than sprint and somehow managing both—and you pushed yourself to match the pace, the dress's hem gathered in one hand the way Bofur had told you, the terrain turning rocky and broken underfoot the moment you cleared the stream. The clearing disappeared behind you. The trees thickened. Someone was shouting directions somewhere ahead and the words were fragmenting in the noise of movement and your own blood loud in your ears.

"Ponies are gone!" Fíli's voice, sharp and furious, from somewhere to the left. "Tethers are snapped—they've bolted!"

"Leave them!" Thorin, from ahead. "Keep moving"

An impact behind you—ground-shaking, enormous —something landing at force, and then a sound that was not the Warg's growl but its voice, a different register, and a crash of undergrowth and a dwarf's shout and the specific brutal sound of axes meeting something biological, and you could not look back, you could not afford to look back—

Dwalin had put himself between the company and the first Warg with the total, unambivalent commitment of a man who had decided this was his ground and by his beard he was keeping it. His axes moved at a speed and a precision that should not have been possible for their size—one blocked the lunge of the Warg's rider, the second bit deep into the creature's shoulder—and the Warg screamed, a sound that was all wrong for something its size, high and enraged and in pain, and the rider was already on its feet beside it, blade swinging, and Dwalin was already inside the swing and—

You ran.

The terrain turned into a broad rocky field, the grass long and yellowed, stone outcrops jutting at irregular angles like broken teeth, the sky vast and pale overhead. The company spilled into it from the tree line more Warg's were already waiting, circling the far edge of the field with rider's low on there backs, a third trope was coming from the trees to the north, and the arithmetic of it was—the arithmetic was very bad.

"We're surrounded!" Came the sharp shout of Kíli's voice, all concern, no whisper of the playful cheer you'd grown accustomed to.

"Hold your ground!" Thorin's voice, cracking like a whip across the noise.

It happened so fast you barely processed it. The company pulled inward and at the inward point, the center of the circle that formed—blades out, axes raised, bows up—was you. Not by your decision. Not with any particular discussion. They simply moved and you were at the middle of it, Bilbo a half-step to your left and also clearly where they'd decided he belonged, the two of you in the eye of a ring of armed dwarves that closed around you like a fist closing.

You reached for your dagger. Your hands were shaking.

"Kíli—shoot them!" Thorin again, positioned at the foremost point of the circle, his sword forward.

Kíli's bow came up, the string drawn smooth and fast, and the arrow left it before you'd processed he'd released it—a sound like a whisper and then a wet sound and a Warg's rider pitched sideways off its mount with Kíli's arrow through the meat of its shoulder, crashing into the long grass.

"Ori—stay close!" Balin, somewhere to your right.

"Down—get down!" Fíli and Bilbo dropped without question, and you went with him, crouching, and something enormous passed over your heads, the displaced air of the Warg's leap pressing against your hair and the back of your neck like a hot hand.

The sound of it landing was behind you now, and the sounds that followed—metal and impact and the wet, terrible sounds of a fight that was close and real and not remotely like anything any action squence had ever prepared you for—came from everywhere at once, the circle of the company breaking and reforming around individual engagements.

Thorin's voice cut through all of it.

And Balin "watch your backs Lads, watch their flanks!"

"second rider's up —it's UP—"

And underneath all of it, the continuous, overlapping sounds of the Wargs themselves—that wrong, deep screaming-growl, the sound of them in pain and the sound of them attacking—and you were crouching in the long grass with the dagger in your shaking hand and you were looking at all of it and you couldn't—you couldn't make it into something manageable, couldn't find any edge of it to hold—

"Move!" Fíli's hand hit your shoulder and you moved.

You didn't see what separated you, one moment you were moving with Fíli, the long grass closing behind you both and the next the ground dropped sharply to the right and you went with it—stumbling, catching yourself on your hands, the dagger scraping stone—when you looked back the grass was a rock wall and the sounds were on the other side of it, you were alone in a narrow channel of rock, a natural gully between two outcrops, barely wide enough for two people to stand abreast.

You pressed your back to the stone. Tried to control your breathing. Failed. Got partway there on the third attempt.

Okay. Okay. Just go find them. Go back the way you came. You can hear them—that's them, that's shouting, that's Balin and Kíli, the yelling is Thorin, if he's yelling they are fine, it's fine—just go back and—

The shape that appeared at the end of the gully was not one of the company.

The Warg came low, head swinging, its rider still mounted but listing badly, one arm hanging wrong and dark with something that glistened black in the afternoon light. Injured—you could see that, even through the blind static of terror, the creature's gait hitched, one foreleg dragging slightly, the rider's grip on its scruff loose and unsteady.

It didn't make them any less terrifying. The Warg's head swung toward you and those pale eyes found you and it stopped. Planted all four of its enormous paws in the earth of the gully and stopped, the sound that came from its chest was the continuous, escalating growl, getting louder, louder, and it was so close in the narrow channel that you could smell it—blood and animal and something rotten underneath, the hot, fetid wave of its breath reaching you as its lips peeled back.

The rider raised its head and looked at you.

"Goth-izub shulg brogb lat matat, Shulg-izg brogb akr grish-ob" it's words where like hate given form.

You didn't understand the them, guttural and harsh, consonants that weren't made for a human throat, spat at you like something thrown. But the tone needed no translation. The tone was a thing you understood somewhere below language—contempt, and rage, and intent—the rider was sliding from the Warg's back, slowly, its remaining good arm raising the crude blade, and there was nowhere to go. The gully wall was at your back, solid rock, and the Warg was at the gully's mouth, and the rider was between them, and the gap between you was closing.

Back against the rock. Back against the—

Your back hit stone. Already there. Already against it. Nowhere.

The rider was close enough now that you could see the texture of the armour—rough, crusted with old blood and something else, pieces of what might have been multiple creatures and multiple materials fastened together in no way that was meant for looking at. The face was—you looked at the face and your brain made a sound like a door slamming shut, refusing to catalogue it, storing it as wrong and not human and do not look.

It said something else. Lower, close enough now that the heat of it was physical.

Your hand was shaking so hard the dagger was vibrating. You could feel it. You could see it.

It's going to—it's going to—

Move. Move. MOVE.

The rider lunged.

Your arm came up—not a decision, not a technique, just your body doing the only thing available to it, the blade up between you and the descending weight—the rider's own momentum drove it forward and down, and the dagger found the angle between its jaw and its throat with a horrible, giving resistance that your hand and forearm absorbed all at once, and the weight of it slammed you back into the rock, the stone digging into your spine and shoulder blades with a force that would bruise, and the blade was—your blade was—

The rider's weight listed sideways.

Fell.

The Warg, let out a single keening howl that bounced off the gully walls and echoed back wrong, and then toppled and folded down in one heap, it's neck oozed black from a arrow lodged to the flecthing in its fur, it was only then you became vaguely aware the black wasn't simply liquid it must be blood.

You were standing.

You were still standing.

Your back was against the rock and your arm was still raised and the dagger was in your hand and your hand was—

Black. The blood that was black was everywhere—your fingers, the back of your hand, tracking up your wrist toward your forearm, more of it than you'd imagined, impossibly wrong against your skin, and the rider was on the ground at your feet and you were looking at your hand and you were not moving.

You were not—you were not anywhere, particularly. You were looking at your hand and somewhere in a great distance there was shouting and footsteps and voices calling your name but they were far away and you were here, looking at your hand, at the black blood drying between your fingers, at the specific and undeniable reality of what you had just—

"Here—Fíli— I found her—" Kíli's voice, close, suddenly very close, and then his hands were on your arm, and then Fíli was there from the other side, and they were pulling, actually pulling, your feet dragging before they remembered what they were, and then you were moving with them through the gully mouth and out into the field and the fighting was everywhere and the sounds of it were enormous and wrong and—

"Go, go, GO—through there—" Fíli's hand at your back.

A gap in the rock face. Hidden behind an overhang, invisible from twenty feet. The company was already moving through it, filtering fast into the dark, Thorin at the entrance directing them through with short, sharp gestures, Gandalf counting heads as each one passed.

Thorin eyes found you as you came through and something in his face shifted—fast, and only for a moment—and then you were inside and the rock closed around you and the sounds of the Wargs outside were muffled, and then distant, and then the passage turned and they were gone.

The interior of the passage was dim, the walls close, the company pressed together in the near-dark with the specific tight, urgent energy of people who were not sure, yet, whether it was over. Weapons still drawn. Breathing hard. Several of them with fresh wounds—Glóin's forearm wrapped in a makeshift bandage that had already began to soak red, Ori with a cut above his eyebrow tracking red down the side of his face, Dwalin's knuckles split open on both hands, the old, professional damage under his bracers showing the signs of someone who had been in the middle of it throughout.

Balin reached you first. His hands came to your shoulders, and his eyes moved over you with the quick, practiced assessment of someone who had done this—checked soldiers over after a fight, checked them for damage, catalogued what was salvageable and what wasn't—more times than he'd ever wanted to count.

"Are you hurt?" Flat, quick, direct. No softening of it, because there wasn't time. "Tell me where."

I'm not hurt you thought, but your voice was trapped somewhere slightly behind you, refusing to come out. That's not—it's not mine your mind catalouged for you looking at the sticky blackness on your hand, mine's red.

His scan reached your hand. Stayed there. Something shifted in his face, an internal adjustment he kept from becoming external for your sake, and he said, carefully and steadily "All right. Your all right, lass, you're safe."

Thorin moved through the press of the company with the specific, controlled urgency of a man completing a head count and arriving at the last entry, when he reached you he took your arms in both hands—not gently, not with ceremony, a grip — and he looked at you, the way he looked at things that needed assessing, and his voice came out rough and immediate

"Are you hurt? Where—"

You heard the words the way you'd hear something through water. The shape of them arriving without quite connecting to meaning. You could see him—you were aware of his face, the set of his jaw, the particular tight control of someone managing urgency—but the whole of it had a quality of distance, a glass-wall thickness between you and everything happening on the other side of it.

He shook you once. Not hard. But sharp—the shake of someone trying to bring something back from a distance he himself couldn't afford to travel too, trying to reach something that had gone somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

"Are you hurt?"

Still water. Still distance. You were aware of his voice. You were aware that his voice had a quality of concern underneath the bark of it. You were aware of your own hand and what was on it. You were aware of all of it, individually, in pieces, and the pieces were not assembling.

"Faslibkhêz!" You did not know that word, it was one the company refused to translate.

His hands shifted. One moved from your arm and came to the side of your face, palm flat against your cheek, fingers curving behind your jaw, and he moved your head—again, not gently, deliberate—until your eyes were pointed directly at his.

You looked at him.

He was talking. His mouth was moving. You could see the line between his brows, deep and drawn, the dark of his eyes with the dim light of the passage behind them, the specific expression of a man who is not alarmed in ways he lets himself show and who was currently working very hard at that. You could see all of it. You were looking directly at it.

The glass held.

"—answer me. Can you hear me?"

"She needs a moment." Gandalf's voice. Not loud. Not dramatic. Simply—present, arriving somewhere behind the company, his grey shape at the edge of your peripheral vision, and something in the particular, deep steadiness of it—the quality of very old patience, of someone who had stood at the edges of more crises than you could imagine and had never, once, let one become larger than it needed to be.

"Are you all right?" he said. Just that. Just the question, offered directly, without any of the urgency that had surrounded everything else in the last thirty seconds.

His calm eyes met yours and the glass cracked.

The sound rushed in, Thorin's hand dropped from your face. Your own breathing, unsteady. Glóin's muffled cursing from further back. Balin saying something quietly to Óin. Kíli's voice, very low, talking to Fíli. The drip of water somewhere in the rock. All of it, arriving at once, with the sudden completeness of a picture snapping back into focus.

"Sorry, I-I'm ok—I'm fine," you said. And then, because it needed a qualifier, because Gandalf deserved the honest version "I just need—I think I needed a minute."

"That will do for now," Gandalf said. His hand stayed on your shoulder another moment, dropping only after a short pat.

You leaned against the rock wall and looked at your hand in the dim and breathed, and nobody said anything, Balin appeared after a short while with a cloth and cleaned what he could of the black blood from your fingers with the quiet, practical efficiency of a man doing the necessary thing for the person he deemed necessary to do it for, and around you the company processed in its various overlapping ways, and slowly, you attenpted to reassembled yourself from the outside in.

Then the company was moving again, Thorin's voice resuming its quiet directives, and you pulled in a long breath and followed.

The passage opened onto a hillside track that wound down through country which grew gradually greener and more deliberate, the wild scrub giving way to something older—not farmed, not managed in any way you had a word for, but attended to, with patience rather than intervention.

You walked or rather let yourself be walked, the remaining black blood had dried on your hand, and you pressed your palm against the fabric of your skirt as you moved, and thought—in the careful, slightly removed way you were still thinking in—about the weight against the blade. About the sound it had made. About the rider.

Who you could not stop thoughts about with the specific quiet horror of thoughts patient enough to wait until the immediate danger was over before it arrived properly.

I have never—

I didn't mean—but I did.

The path curved around the face of a cliff, and the world opened.

Sound first a deep, resonant falling, water meeting water from a height, the specific acoustics of a very large space. Then light—impossibly warm and bright, flooding upward as though the valley itself were lit from within. Then, as you came to the true edge of the path and the full view resolved beneath you, the shape of it.

A valley, cliff faces rising on all sides in columns of pale stone streaked amber and copper in the afternoon sun, and in its floor, spreading along the winding thread of a river, something built in stone and open arch and flowing water, terraced and rising, architecture that had not been designed to a deadline or a brief but simply constructed, over more time than you had numbers for, into whatever it needed to be.

Nothing in your life had given you vocabulary for what you were looking at. The part of your brain that had been running cold and quiet since the fight went briefly, completely still.

"Imladris," said Gandalf, at your shoulder, and said it the way you said the name of something that required acknowledgement.

The path wound down along the cliff face, longer than the view suggested, before depositing the company onto a broad stone road leading into the valley proper. The quality of the air changed as you crossed into its borders—cooler, green, carrying the particular freshness of deep shade and moving water.

The figure who came to meet you from the direction of the first set of stiars was tall.

Your brain noted this before anything else, because everything else it needed a moment to process. Tall in a way that reframed the space around you, made the bridge and the stone archway and the flowing water look correctly scaled in a way that everything else since you'd arrived in this world had not, for you. Your eye found the top of the figure's head and drew a line across to the stone arch beside him and did a quick, involuntary calculation, and the calculation produced a result that sat outside the range of dwarf or hobbit and settled in the range of Gandalf or perhaps someone from a catwalk.

Dark hair, braided back from a face that had the kind of bone structure that shouldn't physically exist, the proportions of it too exact, too even, too—much. Bright eyes, clear and unhurried, carrying a quality of depth that your brain kept glancing away from and back to like a light that was slightly too bright to look at directly.

And then the figure drew closer, and you saw the ears, they where not aggressively but distinctly, unmistakably pointed, the tip curving upward to a delicate, deliberate peak that no human ear had ever ended in, and your brain emitted a small, clear signal that something fundamental about the category of person you had been operating with required immediate revision.

The figure's gaze swept the company, and something in your chest did the thing it did whenever you were being assessed by someone whose assessment you couldn't predict, and you moved, without quite deciding to, a half step closer to Bofur.

"Mithrandir," the figure said—a name, Gandalf's name in some other language you registered, confirmed by the way Gandalf's face shifted into the warmth of recognised greeting.

"Ah, Lindir!" Gandalf stepped forward and inclined his head, his eyes crinkled with the ease of an old and well-worn friendship. Then answered in kind, the same language, Gandalf's voice taking on a cadence in it that was different from his usual measured English—a stone-over-water language you couldn't follow, each word shaped differently from anything you'd ever heard.

"We heard you had crossed into the Valley" Lindir replied— his eyes moving across the company again with that composed, unhurried assessment.

"I must speak with Lord Elrond," Gandalf said, switching back, glancing once at Thorin, who stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set and the particular expression of a dwarf performing patience.

Around you, the dwarves had drawn closer together —not dramatically, nothing you could point to as a single action, but the radius of the company had contracted by a few degrees, shoulders tighter, feet planted slightly wider. Thorin said something very low to Dwalin, barely audible.

Dwalin said something back, barely above a murmur, and you didn't know enough Khuzdul yet to catch it, but the tone made the meaning clear enough.

"What did he say?" you asked Bofur, just as quietly.

"Don't trust them," Bofur said, out of the side of his mouth.

"Don't trust—" You looked at Lindir. At the impossible bone structure, the pointed ears, the quality of unhurried attention in the eyes. "What is he?"

Bofur looked at you sideways. "You don't know?"

"Did you miss the part where I fell from the sky a couple months ago?"

"Fair," he conceded. He dropped his voice another degree. "Their Elves."

You looked at him.

"Elves?" you said.

"Aye."

You looked back at Lindir. At the ears. At the height. "Right," you said, after a moment. "That's—okay. That's a thing too."

"Do not trust them," Bofur said again, with the firm, practiced certainty of someone reciting an inherited principle.

"I genuinely don't know enough about any of them to have an opinion," you said, which was true, and Bofur accepted this as an adequate if unsatisfying answer.

Gandalf and Lindir were still speaking—back and forth, something being negotiated or arranged in the easy, unhurried manner of people who had done this before.

The horns came without warning. From behind—the sound of them carrying down and around the valley with a resonance that put your teeth together, and you turned with the rest of the company to find a group of mounted figures coming along the bridge at speed, hooves ringing on the stone in a fast, controlled rhythm, armour catching the valley light along every edge.

Tall. All of them tall, helmeted, armed with the considered economy of people who wore weapons the way other people wore clothing—not in display, not threatening with them, simply having them, the way you had a coat, because it was sensible to have a coat.

Pointed ears beneath the helmets. Several pairs, visible even in the motion of their approach.

Thorin's voice cut through the company, clipped and hard "Ifridî bekâr, close ranks!"

The company moved with a speed that was slightly alarming even now, even having watched them fight—weapons out, bodies turning outward, the loose group compressing into a tight, outward-facing ring with a speed and coherence that spoke of something drilled so deeply it didn't require thought. A hand closed on the back of your dress—the fabric just below your shoulders, firm and decisive—and pulled you backward into the center of the ring, it happened fast enough that you were already in the middle of the company before you'd registered the movement.

The mounted figures arrived at the outer edge of the ring. Not a charge. Not an attack. A circuit—the horses moving in a controlled, deliberate loop around the perimeter of the company, the riders' faces unreadable under their helmets, spears held at their side's and the sound of the hooves on the stone and the quality of the encirclement—the studied, unhurried competence of it—produced a specific kind of fear that was different from your earlier fear, which had been immediate and animal. This was colder. More deliberate.

Around you, several of the dwarves were muttering, lowly, the sounds of people who had opinions they were keeping below the threshold of a confrontation but not by much.

"Nogothrim," one of the riders said, as they completed the circuit and drew up in a circle—the tone of it was neither friendly nor hostile and was somehow worse than either would have been.

"It's Dwarves to the likes of you" Glóin offered in response from behind his teeth.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

One of the riders, swung down from his horse with a movement that was entirely too fluid for the amount of armour involved, and crossed the remaining ground on foot.

He was taller than Lindir. Taller, a little broader in the shoulders, the armour catching the valley light differently at this proximity—intricate work, you registered, even through the general overwhelm of the situation, the kind of craft that had cost serious time. The face beneath the helmet, once removed, was the same impossible construction as Lindir's — the bones too exact, though where Lindir's face had carried something quietly welcoming, this face carried something else. Ancient, and measured, and entirely composed.

"Mae govannen," he said then, to Gandalf, as the figure arrived at his side, and the two of them inclined their heads with the warmth of a long and complicated friendship.

"Lord Elrond", Gandalf said and the warmth spread to his features as the Elven Lord turned back to the assembled company.

You were still in the middle of the ring, surrounded by dwarves on all sides, the press of them close and warm and familiar in a way that your body had apparently accepted as normal somewhere over the journey without you noticing. You watched Elrond from above Dori's shoulders and the edge of Glóin's axe—which was still raised, the whole company still armed, nobody having given the order to stand down—and tried to reconcile everything you were currently looking at with anything you had a prior reference for, and failed, and filed this under the increasingly long list of things for later.

He held up something—a blade, black and curved, which he displayed to the company with the particular gesture of a man providing evidence rather than making a threat.

"We have been hunting a pack of orcs that came up from the south, we slew a number near the Hidden Pass" He looked at Gandalf with a slight, deliberate emphasis on the second half of that sentence.

"Ah," Gandalf said, with the serenity of a man who was not going to volunteer information under mild pressure. "That may have been us."

The corners of Elrond's eyes moved in a way that was not quite expression but indicated internal activity. He looked at the company. At you, briefly and specifically, in a way that lasted exactly one second longer than the others and left you with the distinct, uncomfortable feeling of having been placed in a category rather than simply noticed. Before his eyes moved to Thorin and stopped.

"Welcome, Thorin, son of Thráin," Lord Elrond addressed—with a quality of antiquity that you felt rather than heard, syllables shaping themselves around Thorin's name with precision.

Thorin stepped forward, the two of them regarded each other across a distance of perhaps five feet, and the quality of the silence between them had the particular density of two people conducting a full conversation through posture alone.

Thorin's chin lifted. "I do not believe we have met," he said, in flat, deliberate English.

"You have your grandfather's bearing." Lord Elrond's eyes moved across Thorin with recognition. "I knew Thror when he still resided under the Mountain."

The faintest tightening around Thorin's jaw. "Indeed. He made no mention of you."

A pause in which the Elrond absorbed this without visible reaction, which you suspected was itself a kind of response.

His gaze returned to the whole company, and he addressed them—in Elvish, measured and formal, several sentences, the words flowing with the particular ordered grace of a language that had been arranged carefully.

Glóin made a sound in front of you that communicated a specific flavour of deep, immediate and long held suspicion.

"What is he saying, does he offer us insult!" he growled.

"No Master Glóin, he's offering you food" Gandalf sighed, in the long-suffering tone of a man who had anticipated a misunderstanding with enough lead time to be tired of it before it arrived.

"No." He said it without harshness, the same flat correction he'd been offering all morning. "You're putting weight on the first syllable. The weight belongs on the second. Ai-MÊ-nu."

"Ai-MÊ-nu," you tried again.

"Better." A short pause, the closest thing to praise he tended to offer, and then he moved on without lingering on it. "It means 'upon you.' You'll have heard it before—Khazâd ai-mênu. The Dwarves are upon you."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It is a threat," Thorin said. "That is the point of a battle cry."

You turned the phrase over a few more times under your breath, fixing the rhythm of it, while Thorin watched your mouth with the same unembarrassed scrutiny he applied to everything in this lesson—assessing, correcting, entirely focused on the mechanics of what your tongue and teeth and breath were doing, with no apparent awareness that there was anything else worth noting in the proximity around him. You, on the other hand, had become increasingly aware of it, in a way you weren't examining too closely.

"What's the word for—" You hesitated, hunting for something you'd want to say. "What's the word for 'thank you'?"

Something shifted behind Thorin's eyes—not visible exactly, but felt, a small recalibration. "Akhminzu," he said, after a moment. "Though it's rarely used so plainly. It carries weight. It's closer to—gratitude offered with intent. Not the casual kind."

"So I shouldn't use it just because Bombur passed me some bread." Your found yourself laughing.

"You should not," Thorin agreed, with something that might, in a different person, have been the beginning of a smile.

You were midway through attempting the phrase again—your tongue catching badly on the second syllable, Thorin's expression settling into the patient resignation of a man bracing for several more attempts—when Gandalf's voice cut across the entire company with the force of an announcement specifically designed to be heard.

"There!" he called, his staff lifted toward a dark gap in the hillside ahead, half-hidden behind a fall of scrub and stone. "A cave."

The company drew up. Thorin's pony stilled beside yours, the lesson abandoned mid-syllable, and his attention swung entirely toward the dark opening in the hill with the immediate, total focus of a man who had already guessed, correctly, what it was.

It did not take long for the guess to be confirmed. Dwalin was first off his pony, moving toward the cave mouth with his axes already loosened in their straps, and the rest of the company followed in a loose cluster—Balin, Glóin, Bofur, several others, drawn by the same grim curiosity. You started to follow, more out of habit than any clear thought, and made it perhaps ten feet from the cave entrance before the smell reached you and It hit like a wall.

Something rotten and thick and wrong, the unmistakable, layered stench of old meat and old fire and things that had been dead for considerably longer than was decent, and your stomach revolted before your brain had even finished processing what your nose was telling it. You doubled over, one hand braced against your knee, the retch coming up hard and sudden and entirely outside your control.

"Here Lassie, breathe through this," Balin said as cloth appeared in front of your face, his voice low and entirely without judgment, pressing the folded fabric into your hand before you'd even fully registered it was him beside you. You took it, pressed it hard over your nose and mouth, and the worst of the smell dulled enough that your stomach settled, slowly, from open rebellion into a somewhat uneasy truce.

Balin's other hand found your back, broad and steady, rubbing in slow circles with the unhurried, practiced ease of someone who had done this for many others before, a long time ago, in some other context you didn't ask about. "There you are," he said. "Breathe slow. It will pass."

"That's disgusting," you managed, muffled into the cloth.

"Aye," Balin agreed, with feeling. "Troll cave. They're none of them tidy about their leavings." He kept his hand on your back a moment longer, until your breathing had properly evened out, and then withdrew it with the same unfussy economy he'd offered it, like the whole exchange had been entirely unremarkable. Which, you supposed, for him, it probably was.

"I really did not need that confirmed."

Inside the cave—which you elected not to enter, on the grounds that you'd seen quite enough evidence of its contents from the smell alone—the company had apparently found something considerably more interesting than rot and refuse.

"Gold," you heard Glóin say, his voice carrying out from the cave mouth with an enthusiasm that suggested he'd forgotten entirely about the smell. "There's gold in here. And good blades, too, look at the make on this—"

"Seems a shame to just leave it," Bofur agreed, somewhere further in.

You stood near the cave entrance, cloth still pressed over your nose, and watched with a kind of bemused fascination as several members of the company began the business of digging—actual digging, with actual tools, a short distance from the cave mouth, the dirt coming up in dark clods as they buried what looked, from this distance, like a respectable chest of the looted troll treasure.

"You're burying it?" you asked, when Glóin emerged to fetch something from his pack.

"Aye," he said, like this explained everything. "Can't carry it, consider it a long term deposit." He said it with the simple, practical satisfaction of a man for whom this represented an entirely uncomplicated good outcome to an otherwise unpleasant morning, and went back to his digging without further comment.

You decided not to interrogate the logistics of it further and instead drifted a little ways off, toward where the air was less troll-adjacent, and waited.

From inside the cave, beyond the part you could see, you could make out two voices—low, urgent, clearly Gandalf and Thorin, though the words themselves didn't carry far enough for you to catch more than fragments. Something about blades. Something that might have been a name, said with weight. You strained to hear more without much success, and eventually gave up, settling instead into the patient, slightly anxious waiting that had become a familiar part of your days with this company.

Thorin emerged from the cave a short while later, and the first thing you noticed was that his expression had shifted into something more serious than it had been before the cave —something turned inward, working through a thought that hadn't fully resolved yet.

He cqme directly to you and didn't say anything at first. He simply held something out—a dagger, sheathed, the hilt visible above the leather and unmistakably fine, worked with a detail that suggested craftsmanship considerably beyond what you'd have associated with a casual gift. You looked at it, there was scrollwork along the length of the blade, delicate and old, the kind of detail that spoke of care rather than mere function.

"For me?"

"For you," he confirmed. He turned it slightly, so the hilt caught what light made it down through the trees, and something in his voice when he spoke again had lost a measure of its usual flatness—not soft, exactly, Thorin's voice didn't really do soft, but closer to it than you'd heard from him before.

"You were unarmed in that clearing. I'll not have it happen again."

You took it, the weight of it settling into your palm with a solidity that felt entirely different from the blade Fíli and Kíli had handed you, days ago, in what now felt like a different lifetime.

"Thank you," you started. "This is—I don't know what to—"

But Thorin had simply nodded and turned, already moving back toward the company with the particular abruptness that seemed to overtake him whenever a moment threatened to extend past whatever internal limit he'd set for it, and your thanks trailed off into the empty air where he'd been standing.

Balin appeared at your shoulder a moment later, peering at the dagger with immediate professional interest. He took it from your hand with a gentle, requesting gesture, drew it partway from the sheath, and turned it in the light with the focused attention of a man assessing something he knew and respected.

"Good steel," he said. "Well-balanced. Whoever made this knew their work." He handed it back, hilt-first. "I'll teach you to keep an edge on it. A blade's no use to anyone if it's gone dull."

"Thank you," you said again, this time to someone who'd actually stayed to hear it, and tucked the dagger carefully into your pocket, where it sat with a new and unfamiliar weight against your side.

The rustling came without warning—a sudden, violent crashing through the undergrowth a short distance away, branches snapping, something moving fast and heavy through the trees, and the entire company snapped into readiness within the space of a single breath. Weapons were up. Dwalin moved to the front of the loose formation that assembled itself with no apparent discussion, axes raised, every face turned toward the source of the noise with grim, braced expectation.

"Something's coming," someone muttered, low.

The noise grew louder. Closer. And then, breaking from the treeline in an explosion of motion and very high-pitched shrieking, came a man—or something approximately man-shaped—atop a ramshackle sled drawn by a team of large, frantic rabbits, his robes brown, filthy and trailing leaves and twigs, his hair a wild bird's-nest, his face streaked with something that might have been mud or might have been bird droppings, and his voice pitched at a volume entirely disproportionate to the size of him.

And an expression of such complete, frantic alarm that the company's weapons—which had been raised against an entirely different category of threat—lowered slowly, uncertainly, as the strange figure skidded his sledge to a halt and half-fell off it in his hurry to reach Gandalf.

"GANDALF!" he screamed, careening to a stop in a spray of dirt. "GANDALF! Thank the stars, thank the stars, I need to speak with you—there's something terribly wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, the forest, the whole forest is—"

"Radagast," Gandalf said, with the long-suffering patience of someone greeting an old and well-loved friend who had, evidently, arrived in a state of crisis many times before. "Calm yourself. Breathe."

"I cannot breathe, that's rather the—there is a darkness, Gandalf, spreading through the forest, I've seen it, I've seen the trees themselves grow ill with it, and the spiders, the spiders have grown larger than—"

Gandalf produced, from somewhere within his own robes, a small pouch, and from the pouch a quantity of leaf that he packed with unhurried efficiency into the bowl of Radagast's pipe, which had been hanging, forgotten, from the brown wizard's robes throughout the entire frantic exchange. He lit it with a small, casual gesture of his hand, and the smoke that curled up from it seemed to do something almost immediate to the wild, panicked energy radiating off Radagast—his shoulders dropping fractionally, his breathing slowing, his grip on Gandalf's robes loosening into something less frantic.

"Old Toby," Radagast murmured, with the deep, unfocused appreciation of a man whose priorities had been very efficiently realigned. "Finest pipeweed in the Southfarthing." A long pause, his eyes drifting slightly toward one another. Then, abruptly, the alarm returned in full "Gandalf, the darkness—"

"Yes, yes," Gandalf said, steering him gently by the shoulder toward a fallen log, "you'll tell me everything. Properly. Sit."

It took some considerable time, and a fair amount of further Old Toby, before the conversation resolved into anything coherent enough for the rest of the company to follow, and by the end of it—through a combination of genuine concern and what you suspected was simple practicality, given the lateness of the hour—Radagast had extended an invitation for the company to return with him to his home for the night.

"It's not far," he said, gesturing vaguely with a hand that still had what appeared to be twigs caught in the sleeve. "Just through there. I've stew, I think. And mushrooms. Lots of mushrooms." He beamed at the assembled company with the open, slightly manic warmth of a man who didn't receive visitors often and had clearly decided to make the most of the ones currently available.

And that, with very little further negotiation required, was how the company found itself, some hour later, picking its way through increasingly dense woodland toward the lopsided, vine-strangled shape of Radagast's home.

Which was, in the most literal sense, a structure reclaimed—walls, a roof, the basic architecture of a dwelling—but it had long since surrendered most of its formal boundaries to the forest around it. Vines grew through gaps in the timber. Birds nested in the eaves with the casual proprietary air of permanent residents. A family of hedgehogs had apparently colonised a section of a nearby tree just left of the front step, and several rabbits—relatives, presumably, of the ones currently being unharnessed from the sled—wandered the interior with complete freedom.

It should not, by any reasonable architectural standard, have held together. It did, regardless, with the stubborn, improbable solidity of something that had simply decided to exist and had not consulted anyone about whether it ought to.

Radagast moved through all of it with the same casual, distracted fondness he extended to everything, occasionally pausing mid-sentence to murmur something to a passing creature before resuming whatever he'd been saying to the rest of you.

You found yourself drawn to it almost immediately—crouching by the basket of rabbits while the company settled in around the room, letting one of them sniff cautiously at your hand before deciding you were acceptable and butting its head against your palm with the blunt, uncomplicated affection of an animal that had never learned to be suspicious of people.

"They like you," Radagast observed, passing by with an armful of something that might have been mushrooms or might have been kindling.

"I like them," you said. "This is—your whole house is just full of them."

"Well, where else would they go?" Radagast said, with the simple, genuine bafflement of a man who could not conceive of an alternative arrangement.

Dinner was, by any standard, an event. Radagast turned out to be a host of considerable, if eccentric, generosity—bowls were filled and refilled with a stew that was heavy on mushroom and root vegetable and surprisingly good despite its somewhat alarming colour, and the dwarves ate with their usual unrestrained enthusiasm, second and third helpings vanishing at a pace that had Radagast beaming with the particular delight of a man whose cooking was finally being appreciated by an audience large enough to do it justice.

You ate more carefully—smaller portions, slower pace, the lingering habits of a lifetime spent in restaurants where manners had mattered—and caught Bofur watching you do it at one point with an expression of mild, affectionate amusement.

"You eat all proper like," he said. "Tiny wee bites, you dont have to stand on ceremony"

"I eat like someone who doesn't want to throw up again," you said. "I had a very formative experience with that cave earlier."

"Fair," Bofur conceded, around a mouthful of stew that rather undercut the comparison.

It was partway through the meal that you noticed the small, curled shape tucked into a nest of moss and leaves—quills visible even in its tightly balled posture, the slow, shallow rise and fall of something breathing but clearly unwell.

"What's wrong with him?" you asked, drawing close enough to look without disturbing whatever rest the creature was managing.

Radagast's face, which had carried its perpetual scattered cheer through most of the evening, shifted, very briefly, into something more careful. "Sebastian," he said, with evident fondness, crouching down beside you. "He's been a bit poorly." He didn't elaborate further than that, and something in the brief tightness around his eyes told you not to push, that there was more to it than poorly covered, even if he wasn't going to say what.

"Can I—" You gestured at the small, curled shape. "Can I hold him?"

"Gently," Radagast said, brightening slightly at the request, and showed you the careful way of it—hands cupped beneath, supporting the weight, avoiding the soft underside while the quills stayed safely tucked away.

Sebastian, once settled into your arms, uncurled with cautious, twitching slowness, his small nose working at the air, and you held him close to your chest and murmured nonsense at him with the same low, soft tone you imagined you'd used on small children or babies.

"Hey, it's okay, you're okay buddy, I've got you—" you felt something in your chest loosen at the way he gradually, gradually settled, the tight ball of him relaxing into the warmth of your arms.

You carried him with you back to your spot near the hearth, settling yourself between Bofur and Dwalin, who had claimed the space on either side of you with the easy, proprietary comfort the company had developed toward your physical proximity over the journey so far.

"What is that," Dwalin said, looking at Sebastian with the flat, deeply unimpressed expression of a warrior confronted with something entirely outside his frame of reference.

"A hedgehog. His name's Sebastian."

"It has spikes."

"He's very sweet, actually."

Dwalin looked, profoundly, unconvinced, but made no further objection, and over the course of the evening you fed Sebastian small scraps of vegetables from your bowl, his nose working at each offering before accepting it, and Bofur—who had initially regarded the whole enterprise with the same mild scepticism as Dwalin—found himself, by the end of the meal, leaning over with genuine curiosity to watch the small creature eat from your fingers.

"He likes you," Bofur said, echoing Radagast's earlier observation, and there was something warm in the way he said it.

"Can I feed the little lad?" He smiled not taking his eyes off Sebastian's twitching nose.

You ended up wedged between Bofur and Dwalin, which hadn't been a deliberate choice so much as the natural consequence of the bench filling up around you, and spent a significant portion of the evening with Sebastian curled in either your lap, or Bofur's, both of you murmuring quietly to him.

"He's a good listener," you said and Sebastian, as if personally invested in proving your point, uncurled enough to accept a crumb directly from Bofur's fingers.

Dwalin, on your other side, said nothing at all, but you noticed, over the course of the evening, that he'd angled himself slightly so that you and the hedgehog were tucked safely between him and the wall, in the same unconscious, automatic way he positioned himself nearby in the open nights, and you decided not to comment on it.

The evening's hospitality extended, eventually, to baths—a genuine novelty after weeks of road dust and stream-washing, and the company accepted with an enthusiasm that bordered on hectic.

Bombur went first, on the grounds of volume and the rest of the company cycled through in the rough, good-natured chaos that characterised most of their group decisions.

When your turn came, Radagast pressed a small folded bundle of clothing into your hands with a flustered, apologetic mumble about not having much in your size, exactly, but it should serve.

You looked at the bundle with mild confusion—fabric you didn't immediately recognise, in colours and a cut's that looked nothing like anything in your own world's wardrobe.

Gandalf, catching your expression from across the room, offered, mildly "Wizards are known to travel. It's not so strange that something might be kept on hand for various—circumstances." There was something in the way he said circumstances that suggested more than the sentence strictly contained, but you were too tired and simply thanked Radagast and went to find the bath without examining the clothes any further.

The bath itself was a small miracle—actual hot water, heated over Radagast's fire and decanted into a battered but serviceable tub tucked into a side room, you sank into it with a groan that came from somewhere very deep in your chest, weeks of road grime beginning to loosen from your shoulders.

While you were curled in the bath, Radagast settled himself beside Gandalf, his expression considerably more sober than it had been for most of the evening, his voice dropping low enough that the conversation stayed well beneath the general noise of the dwarves.

"Gandalf," he said, quietly. "The girl."

"Hmmm"

"She doesn't appear to have—" Radagast's brow furrowed, the wild, scattered energy of him momentarily focused. "Well that is—she just—"

"Radagast."

Gandalf's voice. Sharp. Immediate. Cutting cleanly across whatever Radagast had been about to finish, with a finality that left absolutely no room for the brown wizard's sentence to continue.

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant," Gandalf said, lower now, urgent in a way that made Radagast go very still beside his fellow wizard. "I am aware of it. I have been aware of it for some time now. But this is not the place, and certainly not the moment, with thirteen dwarves and a hobbit within easy earshot of every word spoken in this house. Do you understand me?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. I only thought—"

"Later," Gandalf said, with a sharpness that was unusual, his eyes flicking briefly toward the direction of the company still gathered inside Radagast's den. "When there is time, privacy, and considerably less risk of being overheard."

Radagast looked at him for a long moment, something working behind his cluttered, anxious eyes. He didn't push further. He simply nodded, once, slowly, and let the subject drop, though the troubled set of his expression lingered for some time after, even as the conversation moved on to other things.

Eventually, with the water cooling around you finally outweighing your exhaustion, you finished washing and climbed out, towelling off with the rough cloth Radagast had left, and turned, finally, to the bundle of clothing.

It was a dress—foreign in every line of it, nothing like anything you had. The fabric was soft, a deep forest green, the bodice outfitted with simple embroidered detail at the neckline, the skirt falling in a way that suggested it had been made for actual movement rather than display. You pulled it on, and it fit, for the most part—a little loose at the waist, but close enough that the fit itself felt like its own small impossibility, one more thing in this world that had no business making sense and did anyway.

You emerged smoothing the unfamiliar fabric with both hands, self-conscious in the way that came from wearing something entirely new in front of an audience you hadn't fully prepared for. It was, you thought, looking down at yourself, about as far from a blazer and business slacks as it was possible to get.

The room went quiet. It wasn't a long silence. Just a handful of seconds, at most. But it landed with enough collective weight that your hand went immediately and instinctively to check the front of the dress, scanning down for some obvious wardrobe malfunction, some visible disaster you'd somehow missed in Radagast's bathroom.

"Is it on wrong?" you asked, genuinely alarmed. "Oh crap, is it on backward, I didn't really look properly, I was tired—"

"It's not on wrong," Bofur said quickly, recovering first, his expression shifting into something warm and teasing. "No, lass, nothing's wrong. You scrub up rather well, is all."

"Very well," Kíli agreed, with the bright, unguarded enthusiasm that characterised most of what he said, earning himself a sharp elbow from Fíli that didn't entirely disguise his own agreement.

"We didn't realise you'd been hiding all that under road dust," Glóin added, with a rough wink and a fond sort of humour that took the edge off any potential embarrassment.

You felt your face heat, and tugged self-consciously at the sleeve, the teasing landing warm rather than unkind, the company's collective attention settling into something more like fond approval than scrutiny.

Across the room, Thorin had gone very still. He wasn't staring, exactly—his eyes moved to the fire, to his hands, to anywhere else, with the deliberate discipline of a dwarf actively managing where his attention landed. But something in the set of his jaw had tightened, something in the particular careful blankness of his expression working considerably harder than usual to stay careful and blank, and he said nothing at all through the remainder of the teasing, and did not look at you again for some time, though Balin caught him once, the briefest flicker of his eyes finding you and then sliding away with a speed that suggested he hadn't intended for them to find you in the first place.

You didn't notice it. You were too busy being mortified and accepting Radagast's effusive compliments, and trying to work out whether the slight ache in your face was from smiling too much at Sebastian or the general overwhelm of the day.

Later, once the fire had burned low and the company had begun settling into bedrolls scattered through Radagast's cluttered front room, you slipped outside to return Sebastian to his family.

The night was cool and clear, the small hedgehog nest tucked into a hollow near the base of an old tree where several others of his kind were already curled together, and you knelt carefully in the dark settling Sebastian among them with the same murmured nonsense you'd been offering him all evening.

"There you go," you said softly. "Back with your family. Feel better soon, okay little man?"

You straightened, brushing the dirt from your knees, and turned to head back toward the house, and very nearly walked directly into Thorin, who had apparently been standing a short distance behind you for long enough that you had no idea how he'd gotten there without a sound.

You jumped, a small, sharp gasp escaping before you could stop it. "Shit—Thorin, you can't just—"

"You shouldn't be out here alone," he said, without preamble, his voice low in the quiet of the night. "Not in unfamiliar woods. Not after dark."

"I was just putting Sebastian to bed."

"The hedgehog." He said flatly.

"His name is Sebastian"

"A strange name for a hedgehog."

"Radagast named him. I think Radagast names everything." You looked sideways at him.

Something in his expression suggested he found this both entirely unsurprising and faintly, privately amusing, though he didn't comment on it directly. Instead he fell into step beside you as you started back toward the house, the path lit only by the faint glow from the windows ahead and whatever starlight made it down through the canopy.

You found yourself, without quite deciding to, telling him about Sebastian's enthusiasm for vegetable scraps, and the way he'd butted his small nose against your palm, and Thorin listened—actually listened, with none of the distracted half-attention you might have expected from the Thorin you had met several weeks ago— he offered the smallest huff of something that might, in someone less guarded, have been the beginnings of a laugh.

"You are very taken with small, prickled things," he observed, as you reached the door.

"Right," he said. "Khuzdul lesson."

You looked at him. "Gandalf told me your language was secret." You teased.

"It is, but since it is in fact our language, we're the ones that can make exceptions." He said it with a wink and complete airiness, as though this were a minor administrative point. "Balin says it's practical. If you're going to be with us, you should know a few phrases. Useful ones."

"Like what?"

"Greetings, first." He held up a finger. "Oytarg—that's hello, more or less."

You tried it. The Y sat wrong in your mouth, somewhere between the sounds you'd normally make, and what came out was approximately in the right region if the right region were a fairly large and loosely defined area.

Bofur's expression did something heroic, in that it didnt move save for a twitch of the left corner, and barely a snort of laughter.

"Close," he said.

"That was terrible," you said.

"It was a—attempt."

"You're doing the thing Kíli does where you say attempt because you can't say good."

Bofur laughed at that, open and genuine, and Dori, riding on your other side, made a sound of agreement that he immediately tried to disguise as a cough when Bofur looked at him.

"Oytarg," Bofur said again, more slowly, breaking it into its components. "The second syllable—your tongue needs to go here." He pointed, unhelpfully, at the general region of his own mouth.

You tried again.

From behind you, Kíli said something in Khuzdul that made Fíli choke on whatever he was eating.

"What did he say?" you asked.

"Nothing," said Bofur, in the tone of a man deploying the word nothing as a very strategic manoeuvre to avoid warfare.

"It sounded like something."

"He said it sounded like you were trying to sneeze and could not commit," Fíli said, from a diplomatic distance.

"Fíli," Bofur said.

"She asked."

You pulled a face at Kíli, who was grinning with the uncomplicated delight of someone having an excellent morning, and tried—"Oytarg" again. This time it was better. Not good—you could hear the gap between what you were producing and what Bofur had said—but the Y had found its place, at least approximately.

Bofur looked genuinely pleased. Not the diplomatic pleased of a teacher managing expectations but the real kind, and it settled something in your chest that had been quietly insecure about the whole exercise. "Nan'ith,"he said. "That one you can try—it means little sister."

"Nan'ith," you repeated, and this one came out better because the sounds were closer to things you already knew how to make.

Something happened at the edges of the group—a subtle shift, a slight drawing-in. It would have been impossible to point to any single thing and say there, that is the change, but it was there. Nori, who had been riding a horse-length ahead, dropped back half a pace without any apparent reason. Glóin looked over with the quick attention of someone responding to a signal he hadn't consciously noticed. Even Dwalin, who communicated primarily through his physical presence and the weight of his general regard, angled his pony slightly inward.

None of them said anything about it. The lesson continued.

"Khemnar," Bofur said next. "That one means—well, roughly—you have my thanks. Though its a bit formal. You'd use it for something important."

"Khemnar," you said.

Ori, who had been riding very quietly nearby with his book closed—he'd stopped trying to read on horseback after the incident on day three—looked up and said something quietly in Khuzdul that you didn't catch. Balin, ahead of him, smiled without turning around.

"What did Ori say?" you asked Bofur.

Bofur glanced at Ori, who had gone slightly pink. "He said your accent is charming," Bofur said, which you strongly suspected was a generous translation.

You made it through Tâhalj—which meant friend, and which Bofur delivered with a matter-of-fact warmth that made you want to memorise it immediately—and Tharâkh, which meant something like the road or the path ahead and had a rolled r that took you six tries and a commentary from the peanut gallery, before Bilbo, riding up alongside from where he'd been thoughtfully near the back, offered that your pronunciation was markedly better than his, which was kind and probably somewhat true.

"You speak Khuzdul?" you said.

"Ah—No," said Bilbo. "Not exactly"

"Not a single word," Bofur confirmed. "He tried 'Oytarg' once and his pony bit him."

"She didn't bite me because of the Khuzdul—" Bilbo sighed.

"We can't be entirely certain," said Kíli with a wink.

"I can be quite certain, Myrtle bit me because Bombur startled her, which had nothing to do with—" He stopped. Looked at the general run of faces turned toward him with varying degrees of innocent attention. "We're not going to have a reasonable conversation about this, are we."

"No," said Fíli, pleasantly.

Bilbo made a small, undignified sound and looked at the path ahead, and you bit down on a smile and asked Bofur what the Khuzdul word for mountain was.

"'Urâd," he said.

"'Urâd," you repeated.

"There you go," Bofur said, and there was something in his voice that was not quite sentiment and was very close to it. "You're on your way."

The camp for the evening was set up at the edge of a shallow valley as the light was beginning its long gold lean toward evening, next to some sort of ruin and calling it that was rather generous—a chimney, still standing, in the stubborn way of chimneys, the stones dark with old weathering. Beside it the ghost of a frame, a few cross-beams leaning against each other without the walls that had once supported them. A handful of roof tiles had survived, some scattered in the grass with the randomness of things that had given up being in a specific order. Whatever it had been, it was a long time ago.

Thorin looked at it from his pony, said something to Dwalin that you didn't catch and gestured toward the slight depression of ground beside the ruin's remaining chimney. Good wind shelter. Reasonable sightlines.

The unpacking proceeded in the familiar orchestration of it—packs down, ponies seen to, Bombur immediately engaging with the question of the fire with his characteristic single-minded focus. You were in the middle of unloading one of the supply packs when you noticed Gandalf.

He was standing at the edge of the campsite, slightly separate from the activity, and his head was turned toward the south with the very specific quality of attention that meant he was listening to something that wasn't a sound. His staff was in his hand. His brows were drawn together—not concerned, exactly, but engaged with something you couldn't see.

Then he walked away.

Not we're stopping for the evening and Gandalf has elected to take a walk. Not a gradual increase in distance. He simply turned and walked, with purpose, toward the low ridge to the south, and kept walking until the trees took him, and then he was gone.

You looked at Balin.

Balin was watching the treeline with an expression that communicated, without any words whatsoever, that he had no more information about this than you did. He picked up the pack he'd set down and carried on with the evening.

You looked at the treeline for another moment.

Then picked up your own pack and carried on, because the alternative was standing in the middle of the camp looking at trees, which was not useful and Dwalin was already watching you.

Dinner was Bombur's barley again, with a variation involving something leafy that had been foraging-obtained by Óin during the afternoon and which he presented with the brief satisfaction of a man who considers self-sufficiency a virtue. It was good. Bombur had a way of making field food taste like something a person would choose, which was a gift you'd developed a serious appreciation for.

You'd taken over the task of distribution—it had happened organically, sometime around day nine, when you'd been closest to the pot and had just started handing bowls along and no one had objected. It suited you as much as the collection and washing of the companies many dishes. It was something concrete to do, a small shape of usefulness in a context where most of your useful skills were stubbornly inapplicable.

Kíli appeared at your elbow while you were filling the second round of bowls, with Fíli a half-step behind him and both of them wearing the specific expression of co-conspirators who had been workshopping something.

"We've got one for you," Kíli said.

"For what?"

"Khuzdul Phrases."

You looked at him. The expression on his face was the wrong kind of helpful. "How suspicious do i need to be ?" you asked.

"Don't be suspicious. It's a—it's a greeting. Respectful. You can use it when you're handing out the bowls."

"A respectful greeting," you said.

"Very respectful," Fíli confirmed, with a completely straight face.

You should have trusted your instincts, you would reflect on this later. "Abanjabl," Kíli said, carefully, with the conscientious pronunciation of a teacher who wants their student to get it right. "Abanjabl. Try it."

"Abanjabl," you repeated.

"Perfect," said Kíli, with a delight that should have been your second warning.

You picked up the bowls and moved around the fire, handing them out in the order you'd fallen into—Balin first, then Dori and Ori, then the cluster of Glóin and Óin, then Bifur and Bombur. You murmured 'Abanjabl' as you went, partly because you were genuinely trying to practise and partly because the camp was loud enough that you were mostly saying it to yourself, a quiet repetition to cement the sounds.

Ori made a sound when you handed him his bowl. Something short and sharp and immediately suppressed. You glanced at him. He was looking fixedly at his dinner.

Glóin cleared his throat. Pointedly. In a direction that was not toward you.

You kept going, filing it in the back of your mind, and reached Thorin.

Thorin was seated slightly apart, where he often sat in the evenings, looking at something in the middle distance that might have been the view or might have been a thought he was working through.

You held out the bowl and said, automatically, "Abanjabl, Be careful its hot." because you'd been saying it for the last two minutes and it was already in your mouth.

Thorin's eyes came to you, they were sharp in the specific way that meant he'd heard something he had not expected, and the sharpness was not warm.

You held the bowl out. "Dinner?" you repeated, because the silence had taken on a quality you didn't understand but were fairly certain meant you'd done something wrong.

Thorin took the bowl without a word. His gaze tracked past you to where Kíli was sitting by the fire, and the look he sent across the camp made Kíli become very interested in his own soup with an immediacy that was its own form of confession.

You turned around.

"What does Abanjabl mean?" you said as you straightened.

Kíli had found something fascinating in his soup. Fíli had his hand over his mouth.

"Kíli, Son of Víli" you said firmly, as you gave him a pointed look and what you hoped was the dwarven equivalent of his full government name.

"It's—it's affectionate," Kíli said. "In context."

"Which context makes it is affectionate?"

"A very specific context," he said. "That doesn't—that isn't this context, actually, now that I think about it—"

"What does it mean?"

Bofur, across the fire, made a helpless gesture. "Roughly," he said, with the expression of a man watching a situation unfold from what he hopes is a safe distance, "your brain is made of stones."

A silence.

"Your brai—oh shit." you repeated.

"The stone comparison is—it's not complimentary, exactly—"

"I've been saying it to everyone."

"You have, yes."

"I said it to Balin." Your stomach dropped and did a small summersault.

"Balin's a forgiving sort," Bofur offered.

You looked at Kíli. Kíli had the expression of a person who had calculated that the outcome was going to be worse than anticipated and was now processing this in real time. "It seemed funnier in planning," he said. "In my defence—"

"There is no defence for that," Thorin said, low and precise, "Neither of you will teach any maiden or member of this company words to use against another for your own amusement. You will apologise."

Across the camp, you heard—very distinctly—Balin make a sound that was absolutely a laugh that had been converted, at great personal effort, into a cough.

You turned back to Thorin, who was looking at you with an expression that you could not fully read but which had, possibly, a very faint suggestion at the edges of it that was not entirely severe.

"I'm sorry," you said. "I didn't know what it meant."

Thorin looked at you for a moment. Then he looked passed you at Kíli, and whatever the look contained made Kíli sit significantly straighter. Then he finally took his dinner, his expression shifted It wasn't warm, exactly. But it wasn't cold or dismissive either and there was something underneath it—not quite amusement, but adjacent to it, the faint suggestion of a thing he was actively declining to let his face show. "You'll know better next time."

You went back to the pot, picked up your own bowl, and sat down with deliberate calm.

"You said it to Dwalin as well," Fíli said, from what he had decided was a safe distance.

"I know," you said.

"Just—for completeness."

"I know, Fíli—could you please. Stop. Talking. About it."

The camp had wound down in its usual way—fire lower, voices quieter, the company finding its evening rhythms. You were sitting with your back against the ruined chimney stones, which retained traces of the day's warmth in a way that was very welcome as the night air sharpened, you had a book from Balin's saddlebag—borrowed, with permission—open in your lap, though you were spending more time looking at the stars than reading in the dim light.

Gandalf had not come back. This fact had been sitting in the back of your mind since before dinner and had not diminished with time. You'd asked Balin about it during the meal and he'd said, he'll be back when he's back, which was true and helpful in the way that things were sometimes true and not helpful at all. Fíli had said, he does this, which told you something about frequency but nothing about what this was. Thorin had said nothing, which told you, on this evidence, that this was a known and not entirely welcome pattern.

As the fire burned low, most of the company was in various stages of sleep—Bombur definitively, Óin with the medically useful ability to be immediately unconscious and immediately alert, Dori with what appeared to be sincere dedication to the concept of unconsciousness.

Kíli and Fíli were on watch at the northern edge of camp, a shape in the dark outside the firelight.

The southern treeline where Gandalf had disappeared was black and still.

You heard Fíli before you saw him—that sound of someone going running at speed, which was distinct enough to pull you upright before the fire had registered the movement, and then he was at the centre of camp and his voice was carrying the specific tight quality of someone delivering urgent information in as few words as possible.

"Trolls," he panted, sucking in breath from the sprint. "They've got Bilbo."

It happened almost faster than you could track—weapons were up, voices low and clipped with the particular efficiency of dwarves who had done this kind of thing before, Dwalin already moving toward the trees with his axes drawn, Thorin's voice cutting through the chaos with short, sharp instructions that the rest of the company fell into without question.

You were on your feet too, moving on pure instinct and half-formed thoughts propelling you toward the treeline with the rest of them.

"Bilbo, oh gods, Bilbo"

You made it fifteen steps before something closed around your arm—not rough, but absolute, the kind of grip that had no interest in your momentum—and you turned to find Thorin.

"Stay," he barked.

"What? No — I'm coming, I can't just—" you started.

"Stay at camp." he said, and there was nothing in it now of the warmth that had briefly flickered earlier in the evening—this was flat, immovable, the voice of someone who did not have time to argue and was not going to indulge you. "You cannot fight. You will be a body to protect in a fight that needs none. Stay here."

The word hit somewhere in the chest that it was clearly aimed at. You opened your mouth.

"Stay, please." He offered not waiting for your nod before he was gone, following the company into the dark between the trees, the sound of them diminishing quickly into the silence of a forest that has absorbed a group of armed people and given nothing back.

You stood at the edge of the camp in the firelight with your heart slamming against your ribs and absolutely no idea what to do with any part of yourself.

Okay, you thought. Okay. He's right. You'd be a liability. You know you'd be a liability. Thorin has physically corrected your grip on a sword, multiple times. You have absolutely no business—

From the direction the company had gone, you heard shouting. A clash of metal, brief. Then voices—not battle voices, something different.

Then nothing.

You paced twelve step from the fire to the edge of the camp, then turned worrying your nail with your teeth.

The fire was dying and you didn't feed it because the light felt conspicuous, and you paced the width of the camp in the dark with your thoughts

They're fine, they're thirteen dwarves and they've done this before—centuries collectively and they're fine.

You turned and paced back the length of the camp.

Bilbo is not a dwarf and hasn't done this before, shit, and they said the trolls had him—wait, trolls are a real thing ? which is honestly a lot, I wonder if they live under bridges ?—ugh, focus, the point is trolls are real and Bilbo is— and the company is—

No sound came from the trees. What if something has happened and I'm here pacing like an idiot I'll never forgive myself.

You turned, if I go in there and make it worse I will also never forgive myself.

Shit, shit ok ummm at what point do those two options change places, because right now I've been pacing for what feels like forty minutes—

You checked your wrist for a watch that wasn't there. You'd stopped doing this, mostly. It happened still, sometimes, when the disorientation peaked.

You were so deep inside the spiral of it—so thoroughly lost in the increasingly unhinged internal argument between stay and go—that you didn't hear Gandalf arrive until his hand landed on your shoulder.

You very nearly screamed—the sound that came out was closer to a strangled yelp, your entire body flinching sideways hard enough that you nearly went down, your heart slamming up into your throat with a violence that left you genuinely lightheaded.

"Where did you—Gandalf?—you can't just—" you breathed, pressing a hand to your throat. "Where did you come from?"

"Later," Gandalf said, and his voice had a quality to it that was different from usual—not alarmed, Gandalf did not alarm, but focused, in a way that its usual mild layers were not there. He was already looking toward the trees. "The company—"

"I know, I know, Fíli said trolls — they went, Thorin told me to stay—"

"Good." He was moving. "Come."

"But Thorin said—"

"Do you listen to every instruction given to you by dwarves ?"

"Well no, b-but that's because until 15 days ago—"

"Good, follow me." Gandalf said, which was not the same instruction but had the quality of finality, and you went.

He moved fast for a person with a staff, and you had to keep up rather than keep pace, and you did it without making more noise than necessary because the dark between the trees was thick and the quality of quiet ahead of you made every additional sound feel like an error.

Gandalf made no sound at all, which was—really quite strange, for someone his size and you were adding it to the growing list of things about him that you were going to think about more carefully when, or if you ever found the capacity.

The clearing appeared through the trees like something out of a dream—not a pleasant one. Firelight flickering orange between the trunks, the low rumbling murmur of enormous voices, a smell of woodsmoke and something else underneath it that you didn't want to examine too closely.

You registered the size of them first, the size and then the shape, and your brain did a brief, absolute shutdown and then rebooted with the information that these were real.

These were trolls, and they were real.

Gandalf drew you down behind a fallen log at the edge of the small clearing, and you peered over the top of it with your heart still lodged in your throat.

Three trolls. Enormous, grey-skinned, lumbering things, easily the size of a house, gathered around a roaring fire with the slack-jawed stupidity of creatures who had clearly never been mistaken for clever. And there, strung on a long spit positioned over the fire, were several of the company—Dwalin's extraordinary head, Dori, Glóin, others you couldn't immediately identify in the firelight, all of them tied at wrist and ankle to a turning pole, equally helpless and furious. The rest were crammed into a pile of burlap sacks lined up nearby, only their heads visible above the rough fabric, an assortment of expressions ranging from outrage to grim resignation.

And in the middle of it all, at the base of three enormous sets of troll feet with the desperate, improvisational energy of someone whose plan was being made up in real time, was Bilbo.

"—the secret," he was saying, breathlessly, to the nearest troll, "to cooking dwarf—properly, I mean, if you want to do it right—is in the preparation. You can't just—you can't just throw them straight on, that's—that's sort of errr amateur frankly—"

"What's wrong with how we do it?" rumbled one of the trolls, a vast hulking thing with a particularly unfortunate nose, pausing with a hand halfway to grabbing for the spit.

"Well, for one thing," Bilbo said, edging backward as the troll's attention swung toward him, "they're not —they're not seasoned. At all. You want to—you should rub them down first, get under the skin a bit, otherwise you're just—you're just going to be chewing on smelly boot leather, frankly, and who wants that—"

"He's lyin'!" came a furious, muffled voice from one of the bound dwarves—Kíli, you thought, twisting against his ropes with limited success. "Don't you dare give them ideas—"

"I'm trying to buy us time," Bilbo hissed back, with the particular strained whisper of a person whose deception is rapidly becoming common knowledge to the very people he's trying to save.

"Skin off, is it," said the second troll, considering this with the slow, grinding deliberation of something that did not think quickly under the best of circumstances. He reached for Bombur with one enormous hand.

"NO—no, not—don't take the skin off, I mean you season through it, with herbs, like—" Bilbo's voice climbed in pitch, increasingly desperate. "Like, sage, perhaps, or—do you have any sage?"

The third troll, who had said nothing up to this point and had instead been peering with deep suspicion at the row of sacks, gave one of them an experimental, contemplative poke. "What about this lot," he said. "Could just eat 'em raw."

"Raw," Bilbo said, in the strangled tone of someone watching their entire improvised strategy collapse. "No, you absolutely don't want —that's—that's how you get parasites, actually, this lot is riddled with them, you'd be sick—honestly I wouldnt risk it—"

Beside you, behind the log, Gandalf had gone very still, his eyes fixed on the eastern horizon with a focus that had nothing to do with the chaos unfolding in front of you.

"Stay here," Gandalf said, very low.

"What? No, you can't just—"

"Stay here," Gandalf reiterated, firmly and quietly and with a look that communicated that this was not negotiable in the way that Thorin's instructions hadn't been negotiable.

"This is the second time tonight that someone has—"

But he was already gone—simply gone, the space beside you empty, his shape vanishing into the dark trees with no more explanation than that, and you sat there behind the log with your mouth still open around the protest you hadn't gotten to finish and the very distinct, very uncharitable thoughts.

"—you've got to be kidding me right now."

You sat there for several long, agonising minutes, watching Bilbo's improvised culinary lecture grow increasingly strained, watching the trolls' patience visibly fraying, watching Dwalin strain uselessly against the ropes binding him to the spit, and the fear in your chest curdled, slowly, into something with a harder edge to it.

"I'm not just going to sit here."

You looked at the row of sacks. At the dwarves bound nearest you—and there, at the end of the row, unmistakable even in the dim firelight, was Thorin, jaw set, eyes scanning the clearing with the sharp, contained fury of someone calculating every possible angle of escape and finding none of them currently viable.

You feet moved, well before your brain caught up.

You stayed low, your heart hammering, every snapped twig underfoot sounding to your own ears like a gunshot, and you made your slow, careful way around the edge of the clearing, behind the cover of the trees, until you reached the back of the row of sacks where Thorin lay bound.

His head turned the instant you got close, and his eyes, when they found you, went wide with something that was not relief.

"What are you doing," he hissed, the words barely audible, furious in their quietness. "Go back. Go back to the camp."

"I'm not leaving you here," you whispered back, already working at the rope binding the sack closed at his neck, your fingers clumsy and shaking against a knot that had been tied by hands considerably larger and stronger than yours.

"This is not a place for you. You cannot fight three trolls—"

"I'm not fighting them, I'm untying you—"

"You should be back at the camp, where it is safe—"

"Shh," you breathed.

Thorin's expression had done something complicated in response to that. "You were told to stay at camp," he repeated, at a volume that was mostly breath and ferocious exasperation.

"I know," you whispered, working the knot, which was tight and your hands were not entirely steady. "I was."

"You should not be here."

"Also something I know."

"If they see you—"

"Then—well—guess I'd stop being here," you breathed, and got one loop of the knot free, which was progress. "How are you?"

"How am I—" He stopped, as though the question was too absurd to navigate in current conditions. "I am in a sack."

"Yeah, I see that. Sorry—" the knot had tightened when you pulled the wrong end — "one sec—"

"You should be at camp."

"You want me to go ? Leave you here—let you get squashed like a dwarven panini," you hissed, with the quiet intensity of someone making an important point while also committing a small act of heroism. "I am not going to leave you."

A breif pause. Thorin looked at you and his expression had changed again, though you couldn't spare enough attention from the knot to read the change. "What is a panini?"

"It's—" The second loop came free. "It's a—it's like a sandwich. That's been pressed flat. By something very heavy."

"A sandwich."

"Like—bread with things in it—you know flour water—"

"I know what bread is."

"I know you know what bread is, that wasn't—" The knot came loose. You felt it go and let out a breath that you'd been holding since you left the log. "Can you—"

Thorin was already working the sack open from inside with the efficiency of a person who had been waiting for this exact moment and had his strategy entirely ready. He came out of it in a controlled movement that barely made a sound, which was impressive given the circumstances, and crouched beside you in the shadow.

He looked at you. Close, and dark, and with an expression that had several things in it that would have been very interesting to examine if you were not currently beside a troll fire trying not to be noticed.

"Go back to the treeline," he said.

"I can help with the others—"

"Treeline." And because you were about to argue, he added, quietly "I'll get the others. You've done what you came to do. Go."

Thorin flexed his hands and looked at you—properly looked at you, in the dim light, with an expression that had shed most of its fury and left something else underneath it, something you didn't have time to examine because at that exact moment, a voice—enormous, booming, entirely unexpected—cut across the clearing, making you flinch at the suddenness of it.

"The dawn will take you all!"

Gandalf. Standing atop a boulder, his staff raised, his grey robes catching the luminous pale edge of the waking sunrise as it began breaking over the hills. He brought the staff down with tremendous force, splitting the boulder beneath his feet clean in two, and the light came pouring through the gap and across the clearing in a single decisive wave.

The trolls turned. Saw the light and froze.

You watched, with your hand still wrapped around the edge of Thorin's burlap sack, as three enormous grey shapes stiffened, mid-motion, mid-argument, mid-everything—and then, with a series of low groaning cracks that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the rock itself, turned, entirely and completely, to stone.

It was—very strange, actually. Watching something that large and loud and present simply stop. Three shapes in the early light, arms mid-gesture, frozen in their argument, grey and still and permanent.

Bilbo sat down in the grass, you understood the impulse.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

The walk back to camp had the feeling that walks sometimes have after the worst of something is over—the particular loose quality of limbs that were ready for something to happen and are now standing down, the brain trying to resettle itself into normal operations and finding the transition slightly uneven. Dwarves talked. Bilbo described his strategy in a tone of continued mild disbelief at himself. Dwalin, emerging from the clearing, had looked at you with an expression that acknowledged what he'd seen you do without commenting on it, and had moved on, which from Dwalin was a form of approval.

You sat at the fire that Bofur rebuilt without being asked, and held a cup of water that Balin pressed into your hands, and let the light grow around you, and were very quiet.

You felt, rather than saw, someone settle beside you. Close enough that your shoulder registered his proximity, not close enough to touch, facing the fire the same direction you were, one knee bent and his arm resting atop it. He said nothing for a moment. You said nothing back. The fire crackled. Bilbo somewhere behind you was still talking.

"Abanjabl," Thorin said.

You turned and looked at him.

His expression was—not warm, exactly. Thorin's expressions had their own vocabulary and you were still learning it, but there was something at the edge of his eyes that was different from his normal registered settings. "You said it to me at dinner," he said.

"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't know what it—"

"You also said it to Dwalin." There was something in the delivery that was not quite a smile but occupied the space in his voice where a smile might have been if Thorin were a different kind of person. "Dwalin has not had his brain compared to stone in living memory."

"That's—that's not—I'm very sorry about that."

"Don't be," Thorin said. "The expression on his face was—" He huffed the begins of a laugh at the memory before he stopped himself with a cough. "In any case." He shifted slightly, and his weight settled into a different posture, still but deliberate, a person choosing to stay rather than preparing to leave. "You want to learn Khuzdul."

"I want to stop accidentally insulting people."

"The goals are related." He looked at the fire. "Then we'll begin properly." His eyes came back to you with the focused directness that was simply the way he looked at things, and you had learned by now to hold it rather than glancing away. "Not from Fíli or Kíli. From the beginning." A pause. "If you want."

You looked at him. The light was fully morning now, gold and clean across the hills, and the camp was alive around you with the low movement of dwarves doing practical things, and Gandalf was somewhere producing tea, and Mindy was visible at the edge of the tether line with her blaze catching the light.

"Yes," you said, fiddling with the edge of your sleeve. "Yes, please."

Thorin nodded once. Looked at the fire. And then, with the careful, deliberate quality of someone who does not do things carelessly and is choosing to give you something that is genuinely valued. "Khuzdul begins with address," he said. "How you speak to something tells you what you think of it. In our language, this is not incidental. It is the first thing." He looked at you. "Our word for joke is Gamâk. Say it."

"Gamâk," you said.

He was quiet for a moment, hearing it. "Your vowels are short," he said. "Khuzdul holds them longer." He said it again. You said it again. "Better," he said, and it was specific rather than diplomatic, which meant it was true, and the small, precise warmth of that settled somewhere it was needed.

You held the word in your mouth. Gamâk. Felt the shape of it.

"Gamâk," you said again.

Thorin's expression did something at its edges. Not quite what you'd seen from anyone else, not Kíli's open grin or Bofur's easy warmth. Something quieter and less practised.

"Again," he said.

The morning moved on around you. The camp woke into itself. Bilbo finally stopped talking. Somewhere Bombur began the quest of beginning breakfast.

You had, in the absence of alternatives, found a routine, the dishes were your contribution, which had begun as a tentative offer on the second evening and had solidified by the fifth into something the company simply relied on, with the easy organic efficiency of people who were very good at distributing labour and not in the habit of questioning what worked.

Bofur helped. This had also settled into pattern without anyone explicitly deciding it—he simply appeared each evening at the end of the meal with his hat at its habitual angle and an expression of complete willingness, and the two of you worked through the camp's considerable collection of bowls,spoons and cutlery in a companionable division of labour that required very little conversation on your part because Bofur was capable of maintaining enough of one for both of you.

Today the light was still golden and good, the camp only half-assembled, the air smelled of woodsmoke and the cold sweetness of coming evening and Bofur was telling you something about his uncle and a goat that had clearly been funny the first time and remained funny in retrospect, and you were laughing—actually laughing, which was still occasionally surprising, the discovery that your body remembered how—when Gandalf's long shadow fell across your work.

He offered his bowl and his spoon with the slightly ceremonious gravity of a man who considered even small transactions worthy of his full attention, and you took them and handed him a cup of something warm that had been sitting near the fire—not quite tea, but hot and faintly herbed and the closest thing available to the sort of comfort a warm drink provided.

Gandalf wrapped both large hands around it and looked down at you from under the brim of his considerably sized hat with that expression he sometimes had—the one that looked like idle interest and was almost certainly something considerably more active.

"Bombur said it would help with my ribs," you explained. "I think it's just tea, honestly. But I thought—you look like you might appreciate it."

"I do appreciate it," Gandalf said, with a gravity that was not entirely serious and not entirely not. He turned the vessel in his long fingers. "And how are the ribs?"

"Better," you said. "Getting better." This was true. The sharper edge of it had softened over the days—closer to a general soreness that reminded you of itself when you moved carelessly but had stopped interrupting your breathing.

"I think another few days and I'll stop thinking about them."

"Good," he said. He looked at you over the clay vessel with eyes that had a quality you had not yet found the right word for—depth was the closest, but not quite right, because depth suggested distance, and this was more like the opposite of distance. Proximity to something very large. "You are settling in," he said.

"I'm—trying to," you said. "It's a lot."

"It is," he agreed, simply, without diminishing it. "And yet."

"And yet," you agreed, equally simply.

He took a sip of the drink. An expression crossed his face that might have been approval before he moved away.

Bofur appeared at your elbow. "He does that to everyone," he said, cheerfully, which confirmed that whatever it was had been legible enough to notice.

"Does what?" you asked, mostly to see what he'd say.

Bofur made a vague gesture toward the direction Gandalf had gone.

"The look," he said. "Like he's reading a letter you didn't know you posted to him"

You handed him a wet bowl to dry. "That's extremely accurate," you said.

Fíli found you before you'd finished, this was characteristic—he had a talent for appearing at the precise moment when you were nearly done with something and suggesting you do something else, which you suspected was a skill honed across many years of being an older brother. He had Kíli with him, as he almost always did, and Bilbo trailing slightly behind with the cautiously curious expression he deployed when he wasn't sure whether the thing being proposed was going to end well and had decided to come along and find out anyway.

"We're going to tend the ponies," Fíli said, in the tone of a person who was announcing something settled. "Come on."

"We've not finished—"

"Bofur's got it," Kíli said, looking at Bofur.

Bofur, who had not been consulted about this, looked at the remaining dishes, then at you, then at the brothers. "Yeah go on, I've got it," he confirmed, with the generosity of a dwarf who was sufficiently entertained by watching other people do things that he was willing to absorb the remaining workload.

The ponies were tethered at the edge of the camp on the far side from the fire, a comfortable distance away in the long grass, and they stood in the evening light with the calm, solid patience of animals that had made their peace with dwarves. They were short—sturdy, broad-bellied, with thick feathering around the hooves and the kind of temperament that suggested they had survived more difficult things than this journey and were not especially worried.

One of them, a pale grey with a blaze, turned her head toward you as you approached and her ears came forward with an attentiveness that was almost conversational.

"Hello, Mindy," you said, because you'd learned her name three days ago and horses were something normal, which distinguished them from approximately everything else in your current situation.

Mindy put her nose against your palm with the directness of an animal that liked you and was not shy about communicating this. You produced the apple you'd been hiding—slightly battered from being in your coat pocket, which seemed not to concern her—she took it with the efficient delicacy of a very well-mannered pony and you scratched her nose, and she leaned into it with a sigh that reorganised some of the tension in your shoulders.

"She never does that for me," Kíli observed, arriving at your elbow.

"Do you ever actually talk to her?" you said.

"I do talk to her."

"What do you say?"

A pause. "...I tell her to go faster."

"That's probably why," you said turning your full attention to Mindy who flicked an ear in what you chose to interpret as agreement.

Behind you, something landed in the grass near your feet.

You looked down at it. It was a sword. A real sword, short-bladed in the manner of the ones the brothers wore, its point stuck in the earth at a precise distance from your boots that suggested it had been placed rather than hap-hazardly thrown, but only just.

You looked up at Kíli, he's joking, said the part of your brain that processed these things. The rest of your brain looked at Kíli's expression and concluded that he was not, in fact, joking.

"I don't—" you started.

"You need to be able to defend yourself," Fíli said, arriving at Kíli's side with the tone of someone who had agreed this with his brother prior to the conversation and was here to provide backup. "Not well. Just—enough to whack something if the company is caught somewhere."

"I really don't—"

"We're going into dangerous country," Kíli said. His tone had dropped slightly from its usual brightness into something more serious. "There are things out there that—" He stopped and glanced at Bilbo, then back at you, with the specific calculation of a person deciding how alarming he should be. "Just. It would be better if you could. A little."

You looked at the sword.

You looked at Bilbo, who was looking at the sword with an expression that you suspected mirrored yours precisely.

"Apparently," Bilbo said, "we are going to learn to use swords."

"Apparently," you agreed.

The next twenty minutes were—well. Bilbo was game, which you respected enormously, and which did not entirely translate into aptitude, which you respected in a different way, because neither did yours.

Fíli had given you the very basic mechanics—hold it like this, not like that, the point goes toward the other person, which illicited a roll of your eyes—you had understood these instructions but found understanding them in motion was an entirely separate skill.

You'd been trying to do the thing Fíli had shown you—the basic deflection, with the footwork, nothing fancy—and Bilbo had moved slightly sooner than you'd expected, and the blade caught the side of his finger with the flat, which was not sharp and was not dangerous but was solid, and Bilbo made a sound and you dropped your sword immediately.

"Oh shit, I'm so sorry,"

"It's fine," Bilbo said, examining the finger with the affronted dignity of a hobbit who is not injured but has had a principle violated.

"I didn't mean to, I was trying to—"

"I know," he said. "I know, it's fine, it's not—" He looked at the finger. "Not even red," he confirmed, with mild surprise.

"Are you sure? I can—"

"It's fine," he repeated, with the kind patience of a person who was used to people worrying and had decided it was endearing rather than annoying.

"Try again?" You offered sheepishly.

"That's the spirit," said Kíli, from behind you, in a tone that communicated fond encouragement and the effort required not to laugh.

You and Bilbo looked at each other. An entire conversation passed in the glance—something about being the two people in this company who were least equipped for adventure, who had ended up in it anyway, who were standing in a field being gently mocked into action by two dwarves who meant it entirely kindly.

"I think," Bilbo said, with the measured dignity of a hobbit making an executive decision, "that we've done enough for this evening."

"Agreed," you said, and put the sword down with more care than it had been picked up with, and went to sit on the grass nearby, and Bilbo sat beside you, and after a moment Kíli gave up on the pretence of continuing and came and sat across from you, and Fíli settled beside his brother, and it turned out that what the four of you were actually good at was talking, which required no instruction and improved with practice.

It was into this that Balin arrived with the unhurried step of a dwarf who had a thing to do and had been thinking about how to do it for a while, and he was carrying something—a folded document, several pages worth, with the air of something official. He settled himself on a rock nearby with the composure of a person conducting business and looked at you with his kind, serious blue eyes.

"I've been meaning to speak to you," he said.

"Okay," you said, putting down the conversation you'd been in with Bilbo and giving him your full attention, because Balin's full attention always warranted your full attention in return.

He unrolled the document. It was—thick. He smoothed it against his knee and held it out toward you.

"Your contract," he said.

You looked at it. Then at him. Then at it again. "Pardon?"

"Your contract," Balin said. "With the company." He said it the way you said words to someone who was perhaps hard of hearing—clearly and without additional elaboration, under the assumption that the words themselves were sufficient.

"I—" You blinked. "I have a contract?"

A small pause in which Balin seemed to be recalibrating. "Bilbo has one," he said, by way of orientation.

"I know. I—yes. But that's because he's—" You gestured toward Bilbo, who had gone very still beside you with the expression of someone who had remembered something they should perhaps have mentioned sooner. "He's the—the burglar. He has a role. I just—I fell into a field."

"Aye," Balin said. "And we've brought you along. Which means—" he indicated the document, "—you ought to have the same provisions and protections as the rest of the company. In writing." He looked at you with the patient gravity of a dwarf who considered administrative thoroughness a form of respect. "It's only proper."

You took the document and looked at it. It was—comprehensive. You would give it that. There were clauses about provisions and there were clauses about the conduct of travel and there were several about the management of situations that sounded very alarming in print, and there were sections about the distribution of the—

Your eyes drifted down the page.

There were, you noted, quite a lot of clauses. Including some that seemed—unusual. Including one specific section, partway down the third page, that your eyes landed on and stopped.

"Balin,"

"Mm."

"What is—" You looked at the clause again, certain you'd misread it. You hadn't. "What's a hand clause?"

Balin looked up from where he'd been pointing out a different section. "Ah," he said, and something in his expression became careful in the way of a person who has been waiting for this question and has prepared for it. "That's simply a standard clause. For any maiden in the company who is—unattached."

"What does it mean?"

"It means," Balin said, with the particular kind of diplomatic composure that required effort, "that should anyone within the company—or encountered on the road—wish to—" He paused. "Wish to make an offer for your—"

You stared at him.

He finished the sentence with the expression of someone pushing through a door they know is going to lead somewhere difficult "—hand."

"My hand?" you said after some silence.

"Your hand," he confirmed.

"You mean they'd literally—" Your brain tried to construct the image and failed miserably. "They'd—come and—take my hand?"

You made a sawing motion across your wrist with your other hand.

"Not—no." Balin's composure had developed a faint quality of a man standing in water that was slowly rising. "An offer, for your hand. In—" He seemed to be choosing the next word with care. "In union—in marriage lass."

You stared at him for a very long, very vacant moment.

"Marriage."

"Aye, It simply means the terms would need to be—"

"I'm going to a—we're going to a mountain."

"We are."

"Why would I get married on the way to a mountain?"

"Well," Balin said, with the measured reasonableness of a dwarf who had thought this was going to be a much simpler conversation, "it's not common, certainly, but it's not unheard of, and the contract should cover all—"

"I'm not going to get married," you said. You could hear that your voice had gone flat. "I'm going to a mountain. I don't—I came through the pavement, Balin. I've been here a little over a week. I am absolutely not—" You stopped, because the end of the sentence came out much higher than the beginning, and took a breath.

"I assure you It's standard—"

"Does Bilbo have that clause?"

A pause. A short one, but present.

"Master Burglar is—" Balin began.

"Does. Bilbo. Have. That clause."

Bilbo, to his credit, looked genuinely apologetic. "I'm not sure I read mine all the—"

"Bilbo has different provisions," Balin said, which was not an answer but was delivered with the authority of one, and you recognised the architecture of a statement that was going to require more excavation than Balin appeared to be currently offering.

You looked at the contract. Then at Balin. Then at Bilbo, whose expression confirmed enough.

"Right," you said, and your voice had taken on the very particular flatness of a person who has identified an injustice and is deciding how to feel about it. "So Bilbo has different provisions, and I have a—a hand clause—because I'm—" You stopped, and rubbed your temple with your free hand.

"Because I'm a woman?"

"Excatly, you cannot be unprotected," Balin said, and there was a gravity in it that was entirely genuine, with no apology in it but also no dismissal. "Without family represented in this company, without a patriarchal representative—"

"A what now."

"Someone to—to act on your behalf. In matters of—" He looked at you. "In the traditions of the Dwarven people, a woman traveling without the representation of her family—"

"I don't have family here," you said. "I don't have family anywhere near here. I'm from a different—" You stopped, because explaining this was still a work in progress. "I'm not from here," you said instead. "I don't have anyone."

"Yes," Balin said, with a gentleness that was worse than impatience would have been. "That is precisely why the clause exists." He looked at you over the top of the contract with those blue eyes. "It is not meant as an insult, lass. It is meant as a provision. To ensure that if such a situation arose, you would not be—" He selected the word carefully. "Disadvantaged."

"And who would act as my—patriarchal representative," you said, and the words felt extremely strange as they passed your teeth.

"That is rather what I was going to ask you," Balin said, with the expression of a man who had been trying to get to this point for some time and was relieved to have arrived there. "If you have—"

"I don't," you said. "I don't have anyone to—there's no one." Something in saying it out loud landed in a way you hadn't anticipated. You looked down at the document so that the expression that crossed your face could do so without an audience. "So just—take it out, there's no one to—it doesn't apply—"

"It does apply," Balin said, patiently. "And there are—options."

You looked up at him, and something in your expression made him press his lips into a thin line.

"Moving on," he said, with the composure of a man making a tactical retreat to a better position, "there are other matters in here worth your attention—"

You let him move on, because your ribs still ached slightly when you breathed and you had decided that was your quota of difficult things for this segment of the evening.

"I may have offended her," Balin said.

He had found Gandalf at the fire, where the wizard was engaged in the practice of doing nothing in particular with the appearance of someone doing something very important. Balin settled himself nearby with the expression of a dwarf who had reviewed the entire conversation and arrived at a conclusion he was not entirely comfortable with.

Gandalf looked at him through the smoke trails of his pipe. "Did you?"

"The contract," Balin said. "I was explaining the terms. The patriarchal representative clause, and then the—" He cleared his throat. "The hand clause."

Several dwarves who were near enough to hear this exchange developed a sudden and intense interest in their various tasks.

"She took it poorly?" Gandalf said, in the tone of a man who already had a theory about this.

"She seemed—she seemed to think—" Balin looked uncomfortable, which was not an expression he wore often. "I'm not entirely sure what the lassie thought. But she went very quiet."

"Ah," said Gandalf.

Nori, who had not been invited into this conversation, offered from his position by the fire "I thought it was a fine contract, Balin."

"The terms were entirely standard," Dori agreed, from slightly further away, in the tone of a dwarf who had reviewed a contract or two in his time. "Better than standard, in fact—the compensations alone are quite—"

"She asked if Master Baggins had a hand clause," Balin said.

A small collective silence.

"...Well he doesn't need it, does he?" Kíli's voice finally broke the silence, from somewhere to the left.

"He does not," Balin said.

"Ah-Mmm," said Gandalf while slowly rearranging his lips around his pipe.

Glóin looked up from whatever he'd been doing. "She shouldn't be offended It's protective. My wife's contract when we first—well, her father negotiated the terms, but the protective clauses were the first thing he—"

"She doesn't have a father here," Balin said. "She doesn't have anyone." He looked at Gandalf. "I was wondering whether perhaps—whether you might serve as—" He cleared his throat again. "As her representative. Formally. Given that you seem to know a rather broad scope of things. I'm sure she would grow to—to trust your counsel."

Gandalf considered this for a long and slightly theatrical moment, in the way he considered things when he had already reached a conclusion and was simply allowing the appropriate amount of time to elapse before sharing it.

"I think," he said, "that this is a conversation best had with her directly. In time." He looked at Balin.

"You think she was offended ?" Balin said.

"I think," Gandalf said, carefully, "that she comes from somewhere with very different customs. And that what seems to her like one thing may be something else entirely." He drew on his pipe.

"She is not unlike our Mr Baggins in that respect. Full of assumptions that fit very well where she came from and require revision here."

Balin digested this. "Should I have explained it differently?"

"The difficulty is not in the explanation itself but in the context around it," Gandalf said. "Which she does not yet have." He looked in the direction you where sitting. "She'll understand. I suspect sooner than you'd think."

Gandalf came and sat beside you later, after the fire had been built up and the camp had properly settled, with the careful proximity of someone who has chosen to have a specific conversation and is deciding how to begin it.

"Balin is worried he's upset you," he said.

"He hasn't," you said, which was mostly true and was entirely what you intended to say regardless. "I just—that contract had—" You trailed off.

Gandalf looked at the fire for a moment. "May I tell you something?"

"Please," you said, because you were beginning to understand that when Gandalf offered information, the correct response was to accept it immediately.

"What you encountered today," he said, "and what you may encounter again—matters of representative clauses, of patriarchal provisions, of the particular administrative customs of Dwarves—these are not what they appear to be from the outside."

"They appear to be sexist from the outside," you said, because you were many things but you were not dishonest.

Gandalf looked at you with something that was not quite a smile but operated in the same territory. "But consider." He settled his staff against his knee. "Dwarven women are rare. Considerably rarer than you may appreciate." A pause, in which he seemed to be selecting the shape of the thing carefully. "For every three Dwarves in the world, there is perhaps one Dwarven woman. Perhaps less."

You looked at him. "That's—"

"Yes," he said.

"That's—that's not very many."

"No." He looked at the fire. "As a consequence, they are—not considered lesser. Not by those who know Dwarves, and who know their history. They are considered—" He turned the word over. "Esteemed. In the truest sense. To be protected above all other things. Above gold, above stone, above the great treasuries of their ancestors." He glanced at you.

"Dwarven women, in most cases are guarded better than their gold. And that, you should know, is not a thing to be said lightly of dwarves."

You were quiet for a moment. "So when Balin asked about a —a-umm representative?"

"He was not suggesting you required supervision," Gandalf said. "He was ensuring that you had the same rights and protections that any Dwarven woman undertaking something this dangerous would receive. The clause, the representative—these are not restrictions. They are provisions." He paused. "He was trying to make sure you were not left out. Or alone."

You sat with that. The fire shifted. An log fell.

"I didn't know any of that," you said, finally.

"No," Gandalf said, with the patience of a man who had expected this. "You didn't." He was quiet for a moment. "It would have helped to understand it before drawing conclusions."

He said it gently. It landed anyway.

"Yes," you said. "It would have."

The morning came cold and clear, with the sharp quality of early light in open country, and you lay awake for several minutes before the camp began to stir, looking up at the sky and constructing what you wanted to say.

Balin was by the fire when you found him, doing something with the maps with early-morning focus. He looked up when you approached, and his expression was the expression he'd been wearing since yesterday—composed, warm, but with something slightly more guarded in it than usual.

"Morning Balin,"

"Good morning," he said.

"I owe you an apology."

He looked at you. Waited.

"I didn't understand," you said. "What you were trying to do, or why, or—any of the context for it. And I was—" You stopped. "I think I was pretty unfair, and I'm sorry."

Balin looked at you for a moment with those steady blue eyes, and his expression shifted—the guardedness easing, something warmer taking its place, though it didn't reach the full warmth it might have.

He nodded, once. "Apology accepted," he said.

He looked back at the maps.

"Ahh, I'll just go get—"

"You are," Balin said, without looking up, in the tone of a dwarf delivering an observation he has been holding for some time, "far too skeptical for your own good."

You blinked.

"Strong-minded," he continued. "Which is not a criticism, it'll serve you well. But it does lead you to conclusions before you've gathered the necessary information." A pause, in which he turned the map slightly. "There are things in this world you don't know yet. A great many things Lass and the wisest thing, when you don't know a thing—"

"Is to ask before assuming," you finished, quietly.

"Aye, that's the one." he said. He turned another section of the map. He did not say anything else, and he did not look up, which confirmed the conversation was, for now at least, closed.

You walked away feeling approximately two inches tall, which was, you reflected, the thing about Balin—he never raised his voice and he never needed to.

The rest came mid-afternoon, a rocky plateau wide enough for the ponies and with a flat expanse of grass that someone had decided was useful. The company took advantage of it in the efficient way they took advantage of most things—packs down, boots checked, the small maintenance tasks of people who knew that the difference between a journey going well and a journey going badly was often in the details attended to at moments like this one.

You were sitting, trying to decide if your left boot had done something to your heel or if you were imagining it when a shadow fell across you.

You looked up.

Thorin stood with his arms crossed and his expression doing the thing it did, which was to be almost entirely unreadable while still communicating something. He looked at you for a moment in the way that made you want to check you had all your belongings about your person.

"On your feet," he said.

"I—" You looked around to confirm this was directed at you. "Sorry?"

"You practiced with Fíli and Kíli two days ago," he said.

"I—attempted to," you said carefully.

"Aye." Something in his tone confirmed that a report of this had reached him and that the report had contained specific information. "You'll practice with me."

You stood up. Not because you'd made an active decision to stand up, but because Thorin said on your feet and your body apparently responded to that tone independently of your brain's involvement.

You moved to a grassy area out of direct line if sight of the company, Thorin handed you a short blade—not the one from your last practice, a different one, slightly better balanced, maybe ? Regardless your hands immediately recognized an improvement even without understanding why.

"Your grip," Thorin said using his chin to gesture to your hand.

"I know," you sighed. "It's wrong isnt it."

"Show me how you were taught."

You adjusted to what you thought was correct. Thorin stepped forward and moved your fingers with two brief adjustments, and the difference was immediately, irritatingly obvious. The balance settled differently.

Your wrist stopped compensating.

"Strike," he said, and stepped back.

You struck, at a target he indicated with a nod—a post he'd apparently stuck in the ground at some point, which suggested this had been planned at least a few minutes in advance. It connected. Not well, off-centre, but connected.

"Again."

You went again. And again. And again.

Thorin said very little, which you found more pressuring than commentary would have been. He watched each attempt with the focused attention of someone cataloguing errors, and when he corrected you he was precise and economical—two words at most, a demonstration if words weren't enough, a slight adjustment of your stance or arm or the angle of your elbow.

You hadn’t improved, by the end of it, in any way that would help you in an actual crisis. But something had clarified—the basic shape of the movement, the intent of it, the understanding that what you were building was going to take a consistent effort and time you hadn't been given yet.

Thorin looked at you when you'd stopped. His expression did the thing it did, where it was entirely composed and told you very little, except that he was still thinking.

"You're afraid of the blade," he said.

"I'm—not afraid of it, exactly."

"You are. You pull back at the last moment. Barely, but you do." His eyes were direct and not unkind, exactly, but not cushioning anything either. "That's the thing to address. Not the grip. Not the footwork. That."

You looked at the blade in your hand. "How do I address it?"

"By doing it again," he said. "Many times." He took the blade back, and for a moment he looked at you —not the assessment-look, something slightly different, though the distinction was difficult to name. "Fíli and Kíli, they explained that this is necessary."

It wasn't a question, but it had the quality of one underneath. "Yes," you said. "They did."

He nodded once. Turned and walked back toward the company without elaboration, and that, it seemed, was practice done.

You stood on the hillside for a moment with the wind coming from the south and looked at the post in the ground and thought, with the specific stubbornness that was becoming ypur coping mechanism out here.

"Right. Many times." You muttered mockingly to yourself, in a poor imitation of Thorin's voice.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

The evening camp was smaller than usual, tucked tighter into a valley that offered shelter and not much else, and the fire was lower than some nights and the company was quieter in a comfortable rather way—the quiet of people who had covered good ground and were tired in a satisfied rather than a depleted fashion.

You found Balin at the edge of the firelight after supper, doing what he often did in the evenings—the quiet administrative work, keeping the company's affairs in order as a matter of personal principle, maps and tallies and the various pieces of paper that accumulated around him like his own brand of barnacles.

You sat down beside him without asking, which you thought was probably the right move with Balin—he was the kind of person who received consideration better than hovering.

"Can I see it?" you said.

He looked at you. "Your contract?"

"Yes please."

He regarded you for a moment, then reached into the flat leather pouch beside him and held it out.

You took it. Read it properly this time, from the beginning, with the full attention and the full information you hadn't had yesterday. The provisions clauses, which were actually quite reasonable. The safety terms, which were clearly there in good faith. The distribution clause, about the gold—you read this section twice, because it was specific about what was entitled, and the terms were specific and not small.

You took up a small piece of charcoal from the pile of implements spread near Balin's feet and crossed out two sections. The hand clause, which—even understanding it now, even knowing what it meant and why it existed—you drew a single clean line through each line of text, because regardless of the intention, it remained a thing that did not apply to your particular situation and probably never would. And the distribution clause, the one about the gold, which you crossed out with slightly less certainty but with the feeling that arriving in a field and contributing very little to the actual retrieval of a mountain's treasure was not a basis for a share of it.

Balin had been watching you do this without speaking, which was one of his better qualities.

"You don't want a share of the—" he began.

"I haven't earned it," you said simply. "It's not mine."

A pause. "The clause is standard—"

"Balin." You looked at him directly. "I came here by accident. I haven't—I haven't contributed anything yet. Maybe I will. Maybe by the time this is over I'll have done something worth—" You stopped. "But I'm not going to sign for something I haven't actually earned."

He looked at you for a long moment with an expression that moved through several things and settled on something you couldn't name precisely, but he didn't argue further.

You looked back at the contract. The remaining sections, the ones you'd left intact—the provisions, the safety terms, the commitment to remain with the company and contribute what you were able to, the terms of conduct on the road.

These were reasonable. These were, if you were honest with yourself, things you would have agreed to anyway, in some form. You'd been relying on their food and their fire and their protection and you hadn't signed anything, and that felt—off balance in a way you hadn't quite acknowledged until it was in front of you on paper.

At the bottom, the signature line.

And below that, the line for your patriarchal representative.

You wrote your name on the first line, in your ordinary handwriting, which looked slightly alien against the formal script of the rest of the document.

You looked around the camp for a short moment considering each of the dwarves in turn, with the consideration of a person choosing not a family member per-say but an ally.

Then on the second line you wrote, Master Balin, Son of Fundin.

You folded the contract and held it out to Balin, who tucked it back into the leather pouch with the same care he gave everything he considered worth keeping.

"Goodnight, Balin," you said as you stood and moved to your bedroll.

"Goodnight, lass," he said, and the warmth in it was whole and unguarded, every bit of it back.

Balin opened the leather pouch one more time that evening, unrolled your contract to transfer details and dates into another leadger, and noticed the name on the second line.

Closed it again.

Your handbag sat beside you, faithfully repositioned by Bilbo, who had then stood looking at you for a moment with his hands in his pockets and a slight furrow between his brows before being recruited by someone to carry water.

Balin settled himself beside you with the unhurried deliberateness of a dwarf who had decided this was where he was going to be for the foreseeable future and had made his peace with it. He was not a small person—none of the company were, in terms of the particular density of them, the solidity that dwarves carried differently to other folk—but he arranged himself cross-legged with a comfortable ease and folded his hands in his lap and looked at you with the quiet attention of someone conducting an assessment they did not wish to rush.

By the time the fire had caught and Bofur had begun the business of the evening stew, Óin had come over and crouched at your other side, and the two of them conducted a brief, low-voiced examination that was equal parts medical and simply—careful. Unhurried hands checking what Óin had catalogued on the move, breathing still even, colour reasonable, no alarming rigidity in the limbs. But in the better light of the fire, now that there was better light to see by, certain things were clearer.

"There," Óin said, and his broad fingers hovered with professional delicacy over your left side, not touching, just indicating the line of discolouration that had begun to travel along your ribs beneath the strange fabric of your clothing. Bruising, not yet fully developed, the kind that would deepen overnight and be considerably more apparent by morning.

Balin leaned forward and looked at it, and something in his expression settled into a kind of resigned, gentle acknowledgement. "From the fall?" he asked.

"Aye." Óin sat back slightly. "Won't have caused proper damage, I think—Lassie's breathing's too clean for that. But she'll know about it when she wakes." He paused, casting a considering look over the rest of you—the faint scuff along one forearm, a tear at the knee on your strange close-fitted garment that suggested the second impact had been less forgiving than the first.

"She'll be sore," he said, plainly. "All over, probably. The ribs most."

Balin looked at you for a long moment, with an expression that had something paternal in it, an old warmth of the kind that came from a person who had spent many years watching over people younger than himself. "Poor lass," he said, quietly, to no one in particular. "Didn't even know it was coming."

Óin made a sound of agreement, and then stood and went back to the fire, because there was stew to attend to or as most of the other's knew, stew to rescue from Bombur.

Balin stayed where he was while the camp settled around him, while the fire built itself into something warm and steady, while the smell of whatever Bofur was doing with the stew spread out through the cool evening air, and he was quiet in the easy way of old dwarves who had learned that sitting still was not the same thing as doing nothing.

Gandalf stood at the eastern edge of the camp with his pipe, which he had not yet lit and his eyes were old in a manner that had very little to do with the face around them as they moved over you with a quality of attention that was not analysis, exactly, and not recognition, but something that sat between the two in the particular space reserved for things he was still working out.

Your clothing troubled him. Not the garment itself—cloth was cloth, and cloth was woven in more places than most people knew existed—but the manner of its making. The precision of the weave. The particular quality of the dye. The fastenings, which were neither toggle nor lace nor made of anything with a name he could readily apply.

He had thankfully destroyed that rectanglar glowing device. He had looked at the cards in the wallet. He had read the receipt—had read it with the unsettling ease of someone who was able to read rather more languages than was strictly explainable, and what he had read had told him things about the distance you had travelled that had very little to do with miles.

He stood with his unlighted pipe and his old eyes and the particular expression of a person who has just placed the first piece of a very large puzzle and is already seeing the shape of what the rest of it might become, and said nothing about any of it to anyone.

"Gandalf."

Thorin's voice came from just behind his left shoulder, and the wizard turned with the unhurriedness of a person who had heard him coming from twenty paces.

Thorin stood with his arms folded across his chest, the firelight catching the line of his bearded jaw, and he looked at you with an expression that was doing a great deal of work to appear merely curious and not particularly succeeding.

"She has been unconscious the better part of the day," he said.

"She has."

"That is a long time."

"It is."

A silence that had the quality of a man waiting for more and a wizard declining to provide it. Thorin's jaw shifted slightly. "You know something," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I know a great many things," Gandalf agreed, with the serenity of someone who considered this a perfectly complete answer.

"About her."

"I have thoughts," Gandalf said, which was true, and communicated as much as he intended it to. He looked at Thorin, and something in his expression was almost—not gentle, precisely, but considered. "She is not a threat, Thorin. Of that I am confident."

"Confidence is not the same as knowledge."

"No," Gandalf agreed. "It rarely is. And yet we act on it, constantly, or we act on nothing at all." He finally brought the pipe to his lips, and lit it. "Let her wake. Let her speak. You will learn more from listening than from any conclusion you might draw tonight."

Thorin looked at you for a moment longer. Then turned and walked back toward the fire without another word, which was its own kind of answer.

Gandalf continued to watch your sleeping form and thought several thoughts and with the particular processing wizards had he did not share any of them.

The stew was a joint effort that had begun as Bofur's project and gradually absorbed contributions from Bifur and Oin and, at one point, an unsolicited handful of something dried and leafy from someone, who maintained it improved the flavour and was shouted down by Bombur with the feeling of a deeply held personal conviction.

The company ate around the fire in the way they always ate—closely, loudly, with the particular mix of argument and camaraderie that characterised most of what they did—while the stars came up in the wide sky overhead and the hills settled into the particular dark quiet of countryside.

"She hasn't stirred," Bofur observed, glancing over toward you from his place by the fire. He said it to no one in particular, the way you said things when you were thinking aloud and didn't particularly mind who heard.

"She'll wake when she wakes," said Balin, who had returned to the fire for his own meal but kept one eye toward the rock shelf. "Óin says there's no cause for alarm in it. The body knows what it needs."

Bombur, who was in the process of serving himself a second portion began ladling what remained in the pot with the focused generosity of a dwarf who did not like to see any food wasted.

Bofur watched him with a slight frown. "Bombur."

"Mm."

"Leave some."

"She'll be hungry," Balin said, mildly but specifically with a nod in your direction.

Bombur set the ladle down and put the lid on the pot with the air of a dwarf making a genuine sacrifice and intending it to be recognised as such.

Bofur found a bowl and set it close to the fire to stay warm, and Balin nodded once with the quiet satisfaction of a small logistical problem neatly resolved.

You came back to yourself slowly—in layers, each one slightly less dark than the one before, awareness assembling itself from the outside in. Cold first. Then the distinct press of ground beneath you, the give of something soft under your head, the smell—woodsmoke, and something savoury, and earth and grass and open air—and the sounds, low voices and the settling of a fire, and none of it belonging to anywhere you had ever been.

Your ribs told you about themselves before anything else did.

Ow.

A sharp, localised protest that radiated through your left side when you tried, instinctively, to shift position, and your breath caught on it, and you were awake—properly, suddenly, all at once—with your eyes open and the night sky above you full of more stars than you had seen in your entire life.

You stared at it for a moment. The sheer quantity of them. The complete, disorienting absence of light pollution anywhere in any direction, which meant it couldn't possibly be your lunch break, which meant you were somewhere very far from any city, which meant—

Oh no.

Oh no, oh no, oh—

You tried to sit up. Your ribs registered an objection. You got partway there and stopped, breathing carefully, and found yourself looking at a face.

A broad face, well-lined, framed by white hair and an impressive white beard, with eyes that were very blue and very kind and belonged to a person who was—short. Who was—you blinked. He was seated on the ground beside you, and you were not standing, and you couldn't be certain of the geometry of it, but the proportions were—he was short. Not a child, not even slightly—there was nothing of a child in those eyes or in the particular solid composure of him—but he was—

He was also, you realised, talking to you.

"—easy now, lass. Easy. You're all right. You're quite safe, I promise you."

"I—" Your voice came out strained and slightly strange to your own ears. "I'm—" You looked around. Fire. Grass. Hills. More faces, these ones further away, turned toward you with varying degrees of open curiosity.

"My name is Balin," said the white-haired person beside you, in the measured tones of someone who had clearly been thinking about how to begin this conversation and had chosen gentle directness as his best available option. "You're among friends. You were—you had a fall, and we brought you along with us, for your safety. Can you tell me your name?"

You looked at him. Then at the fire. Then at the astonishing sky. Then back at Balin, who had the specific patient expression of a person, willing to wait as long as required.

"I—yes," you said, carefully, and told him your name.

"Good," he said, warmly, like you'd done something well. "Good. And can you tell me—how do you feel? Can you tell me that?"

"My ribs," you said. "Something's—I think something happened to my ribs."

"Aye," he said, with the kindness of someone confirming bad news they'd been expecting to deliver. "You've some bruising there. It'll ease in a few days. Does it hurt to breathe?"

"Not —not badly. It's more—" You shifted slightly and your breath caught again. "More when I move."

"Then don't move too much," Balin said, with simple practical warmth. "Can you tell me where you're from?"

You looked at him. The question landed in a way he clearly hadn't intended—fully and with weight—because where you were from was nowhere near here, and you were beginning to understand, with the creeping, cold certainty of a person whose brain was doing the maths and producing an answer they very much didn't want, that here was somewhere you did not have a single reference point for.

"I'm from—" You stopped. "I was in the city," you said. "I was on my lunch break. I stepped off a kerb and there was—there was a crack in the ground and—I was falling and then—" You stopped again, because you could hear yourself and you sounded deranged. You pressed a hand carefully over your injured ribs, like the physical pressure might help with the other kind. "Where am I?"

Balin studied you for a moment. "You are in the Shire," he said. "Or the edges of it. We left the bounds of it some hours ago."

The word meant nothing to you. You looked at him carefully, checking for some indication that it should —some cue in his expression that this was a name you were supposed to recognise. There wasn't one. He said it the way people said the name of a place they considered self-evident. "I don't—" you said. "I don't know where that is."

Balin's brows drew together very slightly. Not suspiciously—just thoughtfully, the way a person looked when the answer they'd received didn't fit the shape of the question they'd asked. "The Shire," he said again, carefully. "In Eriador. West of the Misty Mountains."

Most of these words were English. Or—they sounded like English, which was troubling in itself—you were clearly understanding them, they were coming into your brain as comprehensible language and your brain was processing them and none of it was leading anywhere useful, because none of those place names corresponded to anything in your geography. "I don't—" You stopped. Took a careful breath around your ribs. "I genuinely don't know any of those places."

A longer pause. Balin looked at you with those very blue, very attentive eyes, and then he looked across the fire toward the tall figure at the edge of the camp in the grey hat, and something passed between them that you weren't in a position to read.

By this point, the rest of the company had arrived at varying degrees of proximity. None of them had been subtle about it. They'd redistributed themselves gradually in the way that people did when something interesting was happening that they weren't supposed to be interested in—suddenly finding tasks that needed doing near the rock shelf, or simply abandoning the pretence entirely and drifting over.

You were presented, in consequence, with approximately a dozen faces at various heights and distances, all of them watching you with the collective focused attention of people who had been very curious about you for several hours and were not at all sure how to stop now that you were awake.

Some were taller than others. There was a very tall one with a grey hat at the far edge of camp who broke the pattern entirely, and there was a smaller one—round-faced, wearing a weskit, looking at you with a worried and faintly apologetic expression—who was shorter than the others, not that any of them would be called tall.

All of them broad. Solid. Dense with a kind of physical presence that was different from people you'd known. The beards. The—

The beards where impressive.

"Hello," said two voices simultaneously, from your left, and you turned to find two of them crouched a few feet away—younger-looking than most of the others, or at least less weathered, one with braided blond hair and one with dark, both watching you with expressions of identical, unguarded interest.

"Hello," you said, carefully.

"I'm Kíli," said the dark-haired one.

"Fíli," said the other.

"Right," you said. "Uh-hi."

"How do you feel?" Kíli asked.

"Confused," you said, with total honesty.

He nodded, as though this was the expected answer. "That's fair," he said. "You did fall out of the sky."

"I—" You opened your mouth. Shut it. "Yes. I did."

"And then you bounced."

"Kíli," said Balin, without heat.

"I'm just confirming the facts," Kíli said, with the injured innocence of a dwarf who had been excluded from the initial conversation and was going to reclaim some participation where he could.

The weskit one—the smaller, round-faced one—had been hovering at a careful distance, and now edged slightly closer with the diffident air of someone approaching something uncertain. He had a bowl in his hands. He extended it across the space between you, not quite meeting your eyes, and then looked up and did meet them, and his expression went briefly through something that resolved into a kind of determined helpfulness.

"They saved you some stew," he said. "In case you were hungry. I'm Bilbo. Bilbo Baggins."

You looked at the bowl. Steam rose from it in a thin, wavering line. Your stomach, which had been completely uninvolved in the proceedings up until this moment, announced itself with the authority of something that had been ignored all day and was no longer willing to be.

"Oh," you said, and then, because there was nothing else really adequate "Thank you. Thank you so much."