Chapter Text
Prologue
When he has had a short meal and a long, deep ale, Balin goes to find Thorin. Dwalin has gone to wash the road-dust off and find some soft shoes. He will head into town looking for news as well, and perhaps more ale, and comfort after a year away from their home in Ered Luin. Balin aches and wouldn't mind putting his feet up, but first he needs to see his king-in-exile, his king alone.
Thorin is in front of the fire, with a candle lit on the shelf behind him, a little light to read by. The letter itself now sits on the floor beside him, halfway to the crackling embers. Perhaps Thorin wanted to burn it, but didn't quite have the heart, and aborted the motion even as his arm moved to toss the parchment on the fire.
Balin pulls up a stool and gives him a hearty pat on the knee. "I'm sorry, laddie."
"Do you think he'll change his mind with time?" Thorin says softly. His gaze is on the fire, but unfocused.
"No," Balin says. No point in false hope. "He told me straight, ‘don't ask again’. He won't answer another letter."
"Are they well?" Thorin asks, brows raising a little as he imagines a place he will never know. "Does he keep them in a solid home? Are there tutors? Other children?"
"As well as any babe here in Ered Luin," Balin nods and squeezes Thorin's knee. "He's got a level head for business and his herd is of high repute, you know that. It's not pride that he keeps them for. He could marry again and fill his hall with bairns, but he loves his boys. As he loved your sister."
"Good. That's good," Thorin lowers his head. His hand rises to his brow as if to shield his face from the fire's heat, and they both sit in silence as he sobs.
———————————————-———————————————-
70 years later
"Stars above," Kili wrinkled his nose as he stepped off the ferry to stand beside his brother. "What an absolute dump."
Fili let his agreement show on his face. Khagr and Kibil were haggling with the ferryman. Kibil had asked him to transport their bags onwards to their lodgings instead of leaving everything at the customs house. That cost extra, and the ferryman wanted local currency, as during the boat ride from the south end of the lake he'd grown suspicious of the purity of Khagr's silver Rhûn coin. Which was very prudent, as it was almost certainly either clipped or illicitly debased.
There was a small cough behind them to let them know they were overheard. They turned sharply enough that Fili almost tripped on the bull rail that edged the jetty and would have ended up in the lake if the man standing there hadn't grabbed his arm.
"Steady now?"
"Thank you," Fili winced. "My apologies. We just arrived."
"I saw," the man gave them a small nod and held out his hand. "My name is Bard. I'm your welcoming committee. And your new landlord, as it happens."
The blood drained so fast from Kili's face that Fili would have laughed in almost any other circumstance. Before he could return the handshake, Khagr burst between them and grabbed the lake-man's hand. "Hello, sir, hello!" Big grin, big handshake, big voice. Always the centre of attention. "Did you say your name is Bard? Well, what a delight, what a pleasure. I did not expect the Master of Laketown himself would be here to greet us."
Bard extracted his hand from the dwarf's grip and discretely flexed the blood back into his fingers. "The pleasure's all mine. I thought it best to show you to the house myself, since we'll be neighbours. You would be Khagr?" He had good pronunciation, given it was traditionally an Eastern name, but Khagr had promised them that Laketown was the gateway to the bustling, cultured, and - most importantly - wealthy city-state of Erebor-over-Dale.
Fili took another look around the dock, at the tilting gutters, the bare eaves flecked and grey, the dogs snuffling at something dead in the corner. It didn't look like things were bustling, let alone cultured or wealthy.
"That's me, myself, Khagr," the dwarf gave a jolly bellow and waved at Kibil, who was supervising the luggage as the ferryman tossed it onto the dock. Evidently he had decided not to invest any further in Eastern coin. "That's my brother and business partner, Kibil. These are my dear nephews," he threw his arms around Fili & Kili's necks and ruffled their hair until he received two forced smiles. "Orphans. I took them in after their Pa died a few years back. Better than my own sons, if I acknowledged any," he winked at Bard. "Anyway! Shall we follow your lead?"
"This way, please," Bard did not respond to Khagr's verbosity with an entire biography of his own, but he did help them carry the bags.
The house was two and a half stories and a small loft; the half storey at the bottom seemed to be for boats and other wet-gear storage, with a three-walled laundry area that they shared with Bard’s house, which was more like a basement opening directly onto the canal. The ground floor was taken up by a cramped workshop and shopfront with a lot of impractical built-in shelves, and a trapdoor with a ladder to reach the level above. So they'd all be living on the second floor. It did not look like much space from the outside. From the walkways that bordered the canals, the home was accessed via a set of external stairs and a veranda that wrapped around the whole building.
It was a far cry from their father's rough, homely hall where they had been raised in endless mild winters and bright summers, a house of two great, single-story wings of creamy sandstone, adjoined to a large stable and a huge, double-leaved, oak gate. All together they enclosed a paved courtyard that was always busy with distant cousins, customers and pony-trainers. The house had been surrounded by pastures where a pair of young dwarves could run or ride as far as they liked, as the grass beneath them rippled like oceans in the warm south-east winds. Sometimes thunderstorms taller than the mountains even sailed across the flatlands from the far-distant sea.
But that hall was sold. The ponies were sold. It was all long gone.
Before they reached the end of the veranda, Bard waved at another door, with a fresher coat of paint than most of the places they'd seen so far.
"This is my home, myself and my three children. What we call the Master's House is the town hall, now," he moved them on until they came to a less well-kept door at the end of the veranda and Bard pulled out a set of large keys. "I bought the attached house two years ago, after the owner was widowed in the dragon attack and moved in with her daughter. We had some tenants when the town was recovering, but it really deserves an artisan to make use of the shop," he nodded at the two older dwarves. "Hence why your letter of interest was so," he smiled convincingly, "alluring. Here in Esgaroth trade comes in, trade goes out, but the craftsmen - and the craft dwarves - they don't stick around. They all want to settle in Dale, try to get their wares into Erebor or sold in bulk onto a caravan going further afield. We need honest, skilled fellows here for the ordinary upkeep of our homes. I promise there'll be good money in it."
"Ay, well Kibil's the best carpenter you'll find between here and the mountains," Khagr slapped his brother on the back. Fili noted he didn't specify which mountains. Always giving himself wiggle room to renege later. But it wasn't all false; Kibil was a true artisan.
"The dragon attack?" Kili followed Bard into the house first in order to bring the subject back up, colour finally returning to his face. "That was here? Were you living here?"
"Of course," Bard said.
"Did you see the dragon?" Kili continued to trail Bard as the rest of them followed inside.
The house was dusty, and empty, with a few abandoned pieces of unpadded furniture from the previous tenants. No beds in the two small side rooms, but Kibil could knock those together in a day. Fili wondered where you bought dry mattresses in a town as wet as this.
"I saw him," Bard confirmed. Again, nothing more.
"And this is where he died, is that right?" Kili seemed oblivious to the look on their guide's face - their landlord's face - even when Fili caught his eye across the room and tried to make an 'end-it' motion behind Bard's back. "They shot him with a magic spear and he fell in the lake?"
Bard's lips went thin but at last; Kili's gregariousness had cracked something open. "It went a bit like that. But no, he didn't fall here," he pointed out the window, well-oriented to their place on the lake. "He was struck as he made his second pass, as he opened his throat full of fire. The arrow went up," Bard made a horrible motion into his own mouth with his finger, like someone knocking a tooth out, "here. Then he flew on, with sounds of great pain, and fell at the south end of the lake. We all watched the cloud of steam, large enough to blot out the moon, but it was a lawless, unseeded land back then - the dwarves had just returned to Erebor, you see - and no soul saw where the dragon went down. Many treasure hunters have gone looking, as the lake is shallow and full of sandbanks where it braids into the head of the river. But the body has never been found."
It felt like a shroud had fallen over the room. They could hear the creak of the boards beneath their feet and the jetties outside, and the distant calls of water-birds. Then Khagr turned to Bard and said brightly, "So, for the deposit, you'll take Eastern coin?"
---
Tilda was very happy to have new neighbours. The last time her father invited a bunch of dwarves over, life had gotten very exciting. Tilda knows she shouldn’t have found it exciting, as a few people had died, but no one she knew. And afterwards, the Master was caught trying to escape with the contents of the town coffers, and he and his friends were thrown out into the wilderness with a couple of skinny horses and some bread, and her Da had been elected the new master. And when they started rebuilding Erebor-Over-Dale they’d needed a lot of help from Da and the other men of Esgaroth, and everyone (at least, everyone who survived the dragon) had done very well for themselves. So it all worked out in the end, from Tilda’s perspective. The dwarves, in their way, had brought luck to the house.
The first day the dwarves moved in, they opened up the old, wooden awning of the shopfront. Tilda peered inside and saw dwarves ripping the nails out of the shelves, dwarves measuring flat surfaces, dwarves climbing up ladders, dwarves cutting up planks. There was so much activity that it took her a minute to realise there were only four. The one up the ladder caught her watching and gave her a smile as wide as the sun breaking over the mountain, and she grinned back.
“Hello! I’m your neighbour, Tilda.”
He came down off the ladder, stuck his hand through the service window. She reached out and shook it. It was rough and had the gritty texture of dust mixed with sweat, but it was very warm in the cold, autumn air. “I’m Kili. That’s my brother Fili with the tape. Those two are our uncles, Khagr and Kibil.”
There was a curse from the corner, and he made a gesture of farewell. “I’d better help with that.”
At dinner, Da was late home from the Master’s House, so she told Sigrid about the dwarves. Sigrid was eighteen and growing as grim as their Da. She never beamed like the sun. She just kind of looked at things and went, hmm, and then reminded you of chores you hadn’t done yet.
“Don’t talk to strange men,” Sigrid said with only a glance up from her carrots and sausages.
“He’s not a man. He’s a dwarf.”
“Don’t talk to strange dwarfs, then.”
Tilda rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t even really look like a dwarf, the one I talked to. Hasn’t got a proper beard.”
“Maybe it got caught in the wood lathe," Bain sniggered.
“He looked very friendly. Handsome, even,” Tilda added, raising her voice in just the way she knew would absolutely, perfectly on time, make her sister snap.
Sigrid put her fork down sharply. “Tilda. You are thirteen. Do not talk to strangers. Do not go into their house. Tell me if you see anything funny, you hear me?”
“Alright, Madame, sorry,” Tilda drew the apology out with the cultivated ire of a budding teenager.
“They’re our neighbours, Sigrid,” Bain soothed her. “They won’t be strangers for long.”
“If they’re here for long I’ll like it even less,” Sigrid muttered, picking up her fork again. “Nobody comes to this town because they want to be here, so they must be avoiding somewhere else.”
That evening, Tilda headed downstairs to the open-air laundry room, which was underneath the building and shared with the adjoining house. One whole wall opened directly onto the canal, for easy access to water or quickly rinsing off anything really nasty. It was also freezing cold as a result, so Tilda had been putting off a visit in the hope Sigrid would do the laundry for her, but Sigrid had seen the basket of dirty linens just as she was climbing into bed and told her to at least take it downstairs.
As Tilda’s foot touched the bottom stair she realised she could hear voices, deep and rough, her new dwarvish neighbours. She froze, mindful of her sister’s warning despite her curiosity. But she would also be in trouble if she didn’t get this pile of undershirts in the tub. For a moment she dithered, and in that moment the voices rose to a frenzied pitch.
“You bastard, you rotten filth. I had a good trade in Rhûn, I had loyal customers. I’ve thrown in everything. And you brought us here for one of your rackets?”
“It’s not a trick,” the other voice wheedled. “To the right buyer, this is worth more than a boatload of gold. Tomorrow I’ll go to Erebor and scout out prospects—”
“You said you had a treasured heirloom with a buyer lined up!” The first voice roared. “You said the sale was a done deal!”
“I do have a buyer. They just don’t know it yet. More than one, I’ll warrant - they’ll bid against each other for the privilege—!”
“Another speculation - another self-delusion! Give it to me, give me this drivel,” there was the sound of a sudden struggle. Tilda willed herself silent and invisible, pressed herself against the wall of the stairwell so hard she would feel the imprint of the boards on her cheek when she went to bed that night.
“Give me that stupid box!” The slap of a closed fist on flesh, and a squawk, and then worse, a scrape and the crack of something hard hitting something soft over and over. Groaning, high and weak, and then it started over again. And then there was only panting.
A clang, echoing across the canal, and the first voice whispered, “Oh Yavanna, oh first fathers, what did you let me do?”
There came a fumbling, then a splash, and then the rough sound of cloth being drawn across the ground. Heavy footsteps thudded upwards towards the neighbouring house.
Tilda gasped for air. Slowly, she lifted her foot and stepped down onto the floor of the laundry. She eased her face around the corner until she could see the room. The house on the far side of the canal still had candles in their windows and there was enough pale, burnished light sparkling on the water for her to see that the dwarves were gone.
Tilda took a couple of shaky steps into the room. A heavy, iron handle from the clothes mangler lay on the tiled floor. In the dim light she could see a dark, wet pool around it, with a smear leading to the far corner. At the edge of the floor was a small drop into the canal. Tilda saw something bobbing on the water.
Like a dream, she put down her basket and went to the water, stretching her arm out to catch the thing before it drifted down the canal. It was a flat box about the size of a dinner plate, lined with what she thought was cheap leather. It looked like the sort of box you would use to store and display gems, perhaps a necklace. This is what they had been fighting over, some priceless treasure. Kneeling on the tiles, she found the clasp and opened the box. The interior was still dry.
She almost understood the disappointment that had so enraged the dwarf. It was a large wallet - no, a sort of folder for notepaper, like where Sigrid wrote up the daily bills. When she opened it, someone had crudely folded and squashed an ink drawing to fit inside. It didn’t look like the deeds to a castle or the last will and testament of a wealthy merchant. Tilda unfolded it. It looked like a careful drawing of a tree, branches spreading to the sky and narrowing to a peak, covered in the squiggles of dwarvish letters. It didn’t even have a wax seal of contract or a signature by some great artist.
There was a splash and Tilda looked up to see a small boat in the distant darkness, rowed by a stout figure with wide shoulders. He was coming down the canal towards her. Panic coursing through her, Tilda folded the paper and its binding back inside the box, snapped it closed and pushed into the water, holding it down deep until the bubbles stopped and it had filled with water. At last it sank straight down into the canal.
She jumped up and grabbed her basket, but again her eye was drawn to the smear leading away from the discarded mangler-handle. Her gaze followed it until she saw the figure sitting in the corner, hidden beneath an old rug. She gasped, but the figure didn’t move. Tilda could hear the brush of the oars clearly, coming closer, but she took quick steps to the other side of the laundry and her fingers peeled back the top of the rug, and beneath, in the faded, golden light, in the glitter of a crescent moon off the water, a pale face—
Tilda staggered back, gagging, and ran for the stairs, dumping the basket by the door at the top and sprinting up to her bed. Sigrid was already asleep on the far side of the room and only grunted as Tilda burrowed under the blankets, dress and boots and all. She could not stop shuddering, she could not breathe and yet was breathing too fast. She could not uncurl her limbs, and at last, her mind gave in to the waning shock and she slept, deep and dreamless.
—-
Bard was home in time for dinner the next night. He enjoyed a peaceful evening with his children, too peaceful by half, for Tilda was uncharacteristically quiet. He packed a pipe after supper with Sigrid, settling across from her in front of the fire while the younger ones were getting ready for bed. There were things they needed to discuss, but he wanted a chance to just sit with her for a time.
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Bard grumbled and got up to answer it.
“If this is town business I’ll—“ he looked down at the two young dwarves, his new neighbours.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” the yellow-haired one - Fili? - stepped closer. “It’s our uncle. We can’t find him.”
Bard tried not to give a sigh. “It’s a rat warren of a town, I know. He’ll find his way if he’s not too proud to ask directions.”
“He’s been gone all day,” Fili said. “We’ve walked the whole town, twice. We don’t think he even came home last night.”
Bard scratched his forehead. “Which… which one is missing?”
“Khagr,” Kili spoke up from behind his brother. One hand was gripping the railing of the veranda. “Wide, auburn beard,” he added.
“Right,” Bard let out a long sigh at last. The one who talked too much and tried to bargain for everything. He leaned forward to look up at the sky. “There’s going to be rain in the next hour. It’s dark enough without adding a downpour. He’ll have to ask for shelter and any door he knocks on will give it, they’re friendly folk all of them, I promise you. They’ll send him home tomorrow.”
Fili shook his head. “Something isn’t right.”
“Tomorrow,” Bard repeated firmly. “Come by the Master’s House if he’s not back by eleven.”
He went back inside, and sat back with Sigrid. He could see through the open door that Tilda was already in bed, which was unusually early for her, and she had the covers pulled over her face. She’d been sleeping the same way last night, too.
“What did you want to talk about?” Sigrid asked, busying herself with hanging some fresh-cleaned linens in front of the fire. There was a washerwoman that came once a week, but the younger children went through there clothes faster than that.
Bard smiled at her. “I’ve had a letter from the head of the Dale merchants’ council. He’d like us to come to a dinner he’s hosting next month - you and I, he specifies. He mentions that his eldest son will be there.”
Sigrid turned her head to give him a wry smile. “I don’t have anything good enough for a councilman’s house.”
“We can afford a dress,” Bard waved his hand around their house. “We could afford a lot of things we don’t have yet.”
“Things we don’t need,” Sigrid finished the laundry and dropped into the chair across from him. She propped her head against her hand. “Do you want me to go? In an expensive dress?”
“I think you should be flattered,” Bard said. “Yes, I think you should go. Perhaps he’ll turn out to be a nice, young man.”
“I wouldn’t have been invited when I was a ferryman’s daughter.”
“I wouldn’t have been invited when I was a ferryman,” Bard shrugged. “But I’m not going to spit on their hospitality now. Especially if an alliance means more merchants in Esgaroth.”
Sigrid laughed, and picked at a fraying piece of the upholstery. “I don’t want to be a cloistered merchant’s wife in Dale.”
Bard nodded. “What do you want, sweetheart?”
After a long silence she said. “To be the Master of Laketown. To run things well and fairly, like you.”
“Well, the bad news is that it’s an elected position, so I can fairly only give you the same chance as anyone else.”
“Or maybe I’ll rule Dale one day,” Sigrid gave an exaggerated shrug. “Why not? Just not a kept creature, trapped in a house, beholden to some arrogant sop who got lucky enough to catch her, babes hanging off her skirts - no, no, not for me,” she sighed.
Bard had no answer, but he wasn’t disappointed, either. She’d eased her mother through the last and fatal pains of childbirth. She’d raised her siblings, taught them to spell and count. She kept the house and welcomed guests to his table. At eighteen she’d already done a woman’s duty by any measure.
—-
A week later, a fisherman pulled Khagr’s body from the lake. He was floating far out to the north of the town, away from the ferry routes. The corpse was barely the shape of a dwarf any longer, but his brother recognised him by his clothes and the beads in his plaits.
“I’m very sorry,” Bard said, squeezing Kibil’s shoulder as they stood over the body, gathered in a spare sheet to keep from losing the detached bits. They were in a private dock under the Master’s House, away from the looky-loos already gathering in the town square outside. Word of a drowning had spread and people had little else for entertainment. Everybody wanted to see a corpse.
“Must have been too drunk to walk,” Kibil said in a flat voice. “Fell into the canal in the dark. He couldn’t swim.”
They went back up to the sunlit front hall, where Khagr’s nephews sat blank-faced on a bench. Fili’s arm was draped over Kili’s shoulders. Bard’s secretary was offering them two small cups of Dale brandy; Kili shook his head, but after a moment Fili took a cup with thanks. Kibil strode over and snatched the cup offered to Kili, and it was gone in a moment. Bard didn’t blame him.
Bard arranged a burial for the dwarf in the town’s graveyard on the Eastern shore. He could tell the nephews were not well pleased with this, as it was a dirt burial and dwarves preferred cut stone, but Kibil overruled them. They hadn’t seen the condition of the body, he’d protected them from that at least. Khagr needed burying as soon as possible.
“It’s strange, though,” the captain of the town guard said to Bard, as they walked from the funeral back to the long bridge that connected Esgaroth to the eastern shore. “That they found him at the north end of the lake.”
Bard glanced at him. The man squinted across the water. “All the currents in the canals flow south,” he pointed out, “towards the River Running. Bodies usually pop out on the south side of town, that’s what the grandpapas will tell you.”
Bard let his words ripen for a moment, then he asked, “Have you heard anyone express disquiet about the dwarves? I will say, he didn’t seem the most honest fellow. You think he could have crossed somebody over money? In two days? Or worse - somebody took a dislike to him just because he was a dwarf?”
The captain shrugged.
“We need good tradesfolk here. We need dwarves to feel safe here,” Bard said with an edged tone. “I don’t want people to make.. conjectures… without proof. A drunken stumble in a new town seems a lot more likely.”
“Ay,” the captain agreed. “But all the same, it’s passing strange.”
—-
The night after the funeral, Kibil sat them down at the table of their new home and told them what was going to happen next.
Fili had just finished going through Khagr’s bags and papers. He had found no valuables beyond a few coins and nothing interesting in the papers, other than a number of replies from Dale landlords declining his request for a shop lease. He had already guessed that Esgaroth was probably not Khagr’s first choice for a home. Fili was sure something was missing; he remembered Khagr packing an old box into his bag, the day they left home - their old home. It had been a flat, leather-bounded box that looked like it might have held jewellery, the sort of thing an artisan might carry to display his wares to potential customers. But he hadn’t found it anywhere in the house, so he assumed Khagr had sold the contents somewhere on their journey.
As they sat down, Kili was cooking fritters on the top of the iron stove and he kept distractedly glancing over to check the pan wasn’t burning. Fili watched Kibil, who had just brought a bottle of something amber out of a cupboard and poured a generous dram into a pottery cup.
“Right,” Kibil said, gulping the liquor. “As you’ve noticed, Khagr was broke. I think we can assume that he deceived all of us, and I’m not here to lay blame.”
“Blame who? He’s dead,” Kili said, and then folded his arms. “You’re not blaming us? He cheated us, too. He was an idiot, he lost our entire inheritance on gambling debts and wild ventures.”
The sting of it was still hot in Fili’s breast, even after almost a decade. The Stonefoots considered a dwarf fully independent at seventy-five years. Their father had died suddenly, without choosing a legal guardian for them; Fili had been a year too young to take control of the estate. Not even a year - ten months. Their father was barely under the stone when the magistrate signed everything over to Khagr, to be held in trust for his nephews until Fili came of age. Ten months was all it took for Khagr to get the stables and the house completely tied up in debts and complex mortgages, so that by the time Fili tried to wrest back control it was like a dead dwarf walking, and within a few years there wasn’t so much as a horseshoe left.
“Then you should have warned me,” Kibil growled.
Fili said quietly. “I tried.”
Kibil shot him a dark look. He cleared his throat, “But the situation remains. It was my money that funded this venture, my livelihood that’s been sold off, and I intend to recoup that loss,” he pointed one callused finger at Fili. “I’ll give you five years training as a woodworker, good training. At the end of it, you’ll have a worthy trade to support yourself and your brother. After that, you can go your own way, wherever you like. Until then, I’ll open the shop as planned and give you the lodgings and board for free, as long as you help around the house–”
“So you get five years free labour and housekeeping to boot?” Fili leaned forward, “I want a fair apprentice’s wage. Whatever the base rate is in Dale. Paid monthly.”
Kibil slammed his hand down on the table and they both jumped. “Don’t interrupt me!” he took another swig of the liquor and breathed the fumes out slowly. “I inherited Khagr’s lease. It’s my shop, my house. You should be bleeding grateful I’m offering you food and a roof over your heads. Or would you rather walk out?”
Fili balled his fists under the table until his nails dug into the skin. He was right. They had nothing. They knew nobody within three hundred miles. If they took Khagr’s few coins, Kibil could even accuse them of stealing from a dead dwarf. Were they going to walk all the way back to Rhûn? With no food and not even a decent tent? In winter?
He said at last. “You take Kili as your apprentice. Four years only. And he gets a good letter of reference at the end of it.”
Kibil glared. “Why him and not you?”
“He’s got better hands for sculpture,” Fili shrugged. “I’ve got the head for numbers. I’ll run the business side of the shop. I know how to balance the books, you can double check them whenever you like. I won’t try any funny stuff,” he held Kibil’s gaze. “I’m not Khagr.”
Kibil huffed through his moustache. “Trial period only. If there’s a single coin out of place, your brother stays and you’re out on the street.”
“Don’t talk to me like you own me, I’ll go where I like,” Kili surged forward but Fili put a hand on his chest.
He nodded at Kibil. “I want a contract for Kili’s apprenticeship. My side of things, we’ll figure out as we go.”
On the stovetop, the fritters began to smoke.
—
The tragedy did more to rally the town around their new neighbours than any efforts Bard could have managed. The drowning of Khagr the dwarf was the most horrible thing that had happened in Esgaroth since the dragon, and the truth was, people were thrilled. There is nothing better than living in peace and comfort and discussing someone else’s misfortune around the dinner table. Several particularly nosy, old biddies took to bringing meals over to the house for a few days, and so were able to make a report of the newcomers right away. “The young ones have very nice manners, and they eat heartily,” one of them said loudly to her friends in the square outside the Master’s house, and Sigrid rolled her eyes as she watched her father leaning in to listen to the gossip. “Their poor surviving uncle, ah, he’s deep in his grief. Won’t even speak when his brother’s name is mentioned.”
Sigrid saw her new neighbours on the shared staircase every couple of days, but gave no more than a passing greeting. She heard them playing music through the wall in the evenings and watched the rapid transformation of the shop downstairs from a derelict husk into a colourfully painted, tidy workspace. She heard from some of lads at the fishmongery that one of the dwarves, Fili, had been in and out of the market procuring shipments of raw wood and testing the quality of nails and brackets, and that he was already taking orders for work to pay for it all. Houses on the lake were always rotting and in need of a master carpenter’s touch, and finally they had two: it seemed that the youngest, Kili, was the assistant to Kibil, whose name was now displayed above the shop in fresh, burgundy paint.
Beyond these details, Sigrid knew and cared little about her neighbours for the first few months. She had half the town to run, as well as her own household. Da needed her more and more as the administration of Esgaroth grew. And now there was talk of building a new town at the south end of the lake, because all the young people kept leaving the lake and heading towards the Lonely Mountain, and there wasn’t enough room in the bulging, patchworked Dale to hold them. A new town would mean safer roads to the south kingdoms and a good base to protect the spreading hamlets and farms around the lake. But they needed money to build a new town, and Esgaroth had only just recovered from the dragon.
So Da was off on diplomatic errands to Erebor and to the Greenwood, trying to play them off against each other and pretend he wasn’t begging for their money. And while he was away, Sigrid had to keep things running, and make it look like it was really the town committee in charge and not Bard’s teenage daughter.
Three months had passed since their new neighbours moved in, and Sigrid finally spoke more than a word to Fili on a cold, clear afternoon near the winter solstice. She went out onto the veranda with a chair to use the daylight while it lasted. Fili was sitting at the other end, outside his own door, clearly with the same idea. He had a pile of sweaters - donated clothes from well-intentioned townsfolk whose children had grown out of them - and was trying to darn the holes.
“Hello,” he nodded at her, and glanced at her fingerless gloves. “I need to get three pairs of those. It’s our first real winter.”
“In Laketown?”
“In my life,” he grinned. “Our family haven’t been West since I can barely remember.”
There was a pause. A boatman in the canal below was calling out to a friend. The gulls cawed around empty freshwater mussels on the edge of the dock. Fili pricked himself with the darning needle and swore, quietly and in some dwarvish tongue.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” Sigrid said dutifully.
“Don’t mention it,” she looked over to check he wasn’t offended, but he winked at her. “We weren’t that close. It was a shock when it happened, but he was probably going to come to a bad end one of these days.” He wrinkled his nose. “He always had some mad scheme and it always went wrong. I feel like I should miss him. He was the only close family our father had. But I don’t.”
“You’re closer to your other uncle?”
Fili shook his head, eyes focused on the darning. “We only met Kibil a few months ago. He’s their half-brother and there’s some bad blood around the remarriage… should I say was their half brother, since father and Khagr are both dead and he’s still here?”
“I don’t know,” Sigrid said.
“I don’t know either. I don’t know how to feel about any of it. But don’t tell your gentle townsfolk all that, they may stop bringing us all these mourning presents,” he held up the worn, thick-knit jumper with the newly-mended hole in one elbow.
Sigrid sniggered and let the silence fall between them again. She had a lot of paperwork to get through, and he looked like he had a lot on his mind.
They sat in neighbourly silence as the sun peaked low in the sky and began to descend towards the Greenwood, Sigrid with her household accounts and Fili slowly darning the other sweaters. Then Fili began to complain about finding clothes that fit his brother, as the only dwarvish gear in town came in a single size, ‘short-wide’, which left a comic gap between Kili’s shirts and his belts. In reply, Sigrid complained about her little sister growing out of her clothes by the month, and how fussy she’d become about choosing the colour and cut of the replacements, trying to pretty herself up in case some imaginary prince sailed into town in dire need of shelter and nursing. Then Fili complained he was the only one willing to scrape the ice off the commode in the mornings, and Sigrid complained that her teenage brother had started pissing straight off their back balcony into the lake as some kind of proof of his masculinity. Fili complained that his uncle still called them “you boys” even in front of Bard, and Sigrid complained that Bard called her “sweetheart” in front of the town committee even when she was trying to audit the armory. It went on like this, as the early afternoon sun sunk over the forest and into the distant keel of the mountains.
Soon it was too dark for either of them, and they were both shivering and had to get up and go inside; but halfway through the goodbyes, Sigrid thought of something else to complain about, so it took them several more minutes, and only the sound of Bain shouting “Sigrid! Where’s the boot grease?” took her attention away.
“It’ll be by his boots. He leaves it right there on the floor,” Sigrid griped.
Fili smiled. “Well. Good luck with that,” and finally they both went home and closed their doors.
To have a friend! It was intoxicating. To be young, full of worries, and then to find someone you could talk to until your toes got cold; Sigrid felt luminescent with the joy of it.