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It was winter, and they were on the road again. Snow was in the air, and what little grass grew on the ragged path they followed crackled under their boots, half-frozen during the night. The last town had suffered them only one month before throwing them out the gate, the mayor insisting that it was with a heavy heart but that they couldn’t possibly spare the town’s winter stores on dwarves.
The dwarves managed to stay warm during the day through the exertion of their march, sweat dewing on their foreheads. In the evenings, their breaths came out as white plumes and their sweat-soaked clothes clung with icy fingers to their backs, but the effort of setting up their tents, building up fires, and seeing to all their number kept them warm.
It was night when the dwarves knew the cold of winter, felt it creep into their bones and sink its teeth into their flesh, sharp and aching all at once. There were not enough fires, for there was not enough wood, nor time to gather it. A few dwarves had managed to buy decent winter cloaks, but the prices were always too high, the merchants too reticent, for many of their number to be well protected against the cold.
Just a few days prior to their leaving, Thorin had bought a long travelling cloak, to replace the one he’d been sharing with Frerin – a tattered, stinking mess of hide and little more. He hadn’t known they’d be leaving – he was still hoping to save up enough to buy his sister a cloak of her own – but the call to move was given and Thorin didn’t even have time to spend his last few coins on a blanket.
So it was that the two siblings spent their nights huddled together in the tent they ostensibly shared with Frerin (their brother always slipped away at the first snore from their father and grandfather’s tent, to reappear at dawn with a wide grin and disheveled clothes). Every night, Thorin wrapped his sister up in his new cloak and settled down beside her. The cloak looked far from new now, though, shared between the two brothers and suffering wind, rain, and mud nearly every day. It never quite dried out during the night, so their tent was filled with the rank damp smell of wet fur, mixed in with the smell of sweat and dirt from the road, and the sharp sweet smell of wood smoke from the fire.
Dís would wriggle close to her eldest brother, nose pressed against the warm skin of his neck so that even that spot of frozen skin warmed, and Thorin would cover her up to her ears, the wolf fur trimming mingling with her hair. She knew the cloak wasn’t wide enough for both of them, that Thorin’s back had only his shirt to shelter it from the cold, but whenever she tried to slip the edge of the cloak over him, Thorin would shift away and tuck the cloak around her. “Be still, little sister,” he would murmur, half asleep. “Be still.”
So she took to sleeping with her arms wrapped tight around him, trying to keep him warm, though she would wake with her hands stiff with the cold. In the next town, she promised, she would sell whatever precious metal she still had left, and they would never be cold again.