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1.
Thorin was ten the first time he met the king of Doriath and Eryn Galen, stiff and formal in his best dress uniform: a beardless miniature of his father. Thranduil was fourteen years old and throwing up in a priceless porcelain vase.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Thorin said, blankly. This was a situation his tutors hadn’t thought to lecture him on. “I thought—that is, I was looking for the receiving room. My father—”
“He’s with my prime minister,” Thranduil rasped, his forehead pressed against the edge of the vase. He looked almost translucent, stands of long blond hair falling loose from his elaborate braid and framing his pale sickly face. “Signing the treaty under which I’ll be obligated to bend over and say ‘please’ to your economic council.”
Thorin considered that for a moment, then bristled in prepubescent outrage. When it came to his father he was instinctively on the defensive, whether he was standing up for Thráin or standing up to him. “It’s a good treaty,” he said. “It’s fair.”
“Well, thank Eru you’ve told me,” Thranduil said. “I might have been angry otherwise.”
Thorin wavered, caught between his indignation and eight years of etiquette lessons. This was a foreign king, after all. Even if he was skinny and sick and throwing up in a vase.
“Would you like me to fetch one of your servants?” he asked, deciding that it was best to be polite. It seemed to him that there should have been someone waiting on him already, or at least guards standing outside the doors, but Thorin hadn’t seen anyone at all in this wing of the palace. That was why he was lost. “Or your court physician?”
Thranduil looked up at him and laughed a little, scornfully. “I don’t need a doctor, little prince.”
“But you’re sick,” Thorin pointed out.
“Walk down the hallway until you come to the spiral staircase,” Thranduil said. His shoulders heaved, and he let his head thunk back down to the vase. His voice was muffled. “The first door on your right is the receiving room. Don’t tell the Minister you saw me.”
“Thank you,” Thorin said, uncertainly. “Are you sure—”
“Go.”
Thorin went. The Erebor delegation stayed in Thranduil’s palace for almost two weeks after the treaty was signed, but that was the first and only time he saw the child king.
He didn’t understand, then. Not any of it.
2.
The second time they met, Thranduil was seventeen and had just tried and executed his prime minister on charges of high treason. Thorin had been listening to his parents and grandparents talk about it for months, and he read everything he could about the story in whatever spare time he could snatch between his lessons and duties.
The pictures in the newspapers didn’t look anything like the pale unhappy boy he had seen three years ago. The king was taller, for one—the other side of the growth spurt that was making Thorin’s life a misery of clumsiness and aching muscles—and too elegant to be skinny. The papers favored slim, and few of the trashier rags even dared to call him svelte. But that made him sound like a moving picture star, or one of the fashionable girls that Duke Fundin was always bringing to the queen’s parties. Thranduil was lovely, everyone agreed. But he wasn’t pretty, or even particularly attractive. He was too cold for that.
And he had emerged, unexpectedly, as one of the most dangerous kings north of Angmar. The cutthroat politics of his court were quickly becoming the stuff of legend. What sort of boy would sentence his father’s closest friend to death?
A month after the beheading, Thranduil attended a meeting of the White Council. It was the first time since his coronation. For almost a decade, a delegation had been sent in his place, but this year he swept into Isengard wearing a set of Oropher’s most beautiful robes, trailed by a tall, dark woman in uniform.
“A pleasure to meet you, Prince Thorin,” Thranduil said when they were formally introduced at one of a half-dozen evening garden parties. His smile was small and mocking, and his fingers wrapped around a clear crystal glass studded with pearl and silver. Saruman, the First Lord, had a taste for expensive things. “How fares your grandfather?”
“He’s well,” Thorin said stiffly, locking his hands behind his back. He didn’t like being teased. He liked it even less when he didn’t understand the joke. “He’s been very involved with our new mining operations.”
“So I’ve heard. And what of yourself? You’ll be joining the military soon, from what your father tells me.”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“And yet you were already wearing uniform when last we met, if I remember correctly. Although,” he said, and drained the glass with a practiced air, “it’s entirely possible that I do not.”
Thorin had the sense that he was treading on the edge of something dark and unpleasant. “It’s a family tradition,” he said.
“So it is.” Thranduil looked on the verge of saying something else, but at that moment Lord Elrond and Lady Celebrian walked in underneath the rose-trellised gateway. “Please excuse me, Prince Thorin. I’m certain we’ll speak again,”
Thorin hoped not. He didn’t like King Thranduil very much, and not just because Thráin privately called him a treacherous, power hungry little brat.
He watched out of the corner of his eye as Thranduil walked up to the newest guests. “Lord Elrond,” he was saying, in an entirely different voice. “My lady. And these must be your little lords.”
“Elladan and Elrohir,” Lady Celebrian said, ushering her two young sons forward to make their bows. “It’s wonderful to see you again, your majesty. Mother says you look so very like Oropher did, when he was your age.”
“The Grand Duchess has been most kind,” Thranduil said softly, and actually let Celebrian wrap her arms around him.
“Would that we had all been more attentive,” Elrond said, over his wife’s shoulder. His eyes were dark and perhaps a little sad. “If we’d known—”
“It’s of little consequence,” Thranduil said, and abruptly stepped out of Celebrían’s embrace. “Come, let me introduce you to my delegation. There are more than a few familiar names, I should think.”
“Ereinion told us that you appointed Eluréd’s youngest daughter as prime minister, pending the general election,” Elrond said. “I haven’t seen her since the wedding.”
“The election is a formality,” Thranduil said, dismissively. “Any girl of Thingol’s line is a second Lúthien, as far as our people are concerned. She was the delight of my father’s court.”
When the woman in question appeared at his side, she and Elrond immediately fell into conversation. The whole encounter had their air of an intimate family gathering, but Thorin already knew perfectly well that he and his father were not invited. There was no room for the princes of Erebor in the old house alliances of the western and southern kingdoms.
If Thrór wasn’t the richest autocrat on the continent, he wouldn’t even merit an invitation.
Thorin saw Thranduil once or twice after that, a flicker of light and embroidery on the other side of a crowded room. They attended all the same talks, but Thranduil was conspicuous by his silence. His prime minister made all the speeches, but in the recesses between debates they often were deep in quiet conversation, inaudible even to the nosiest of spectators.
When the debate swung, as it often did in those days, back to war reparations and the recent troubles in Ered Mithrin, Thranduil leaned forward in his seat, his eyes fixed on Thráin sitting across the room. He was smiling a little, but it wasn’t a happy expression.
Thráin looked up, met his motionless gaze, and scowled.
3.
“Father doesn’t like King Thranduil very much,” Thorin said once, sitting cross-legged in one of the old threadbare armchairs that dotted Thrór’s personal study. Thrór’s father had been a great believer in luxury; Thrór was a great believer in keeping things until they broke or rotted away. The royal palace was thus a curious mix of unimaginable aristocratic hedonism and bloody-minded thrift, and Thrór’s study looked very much like a grandmotherly little antique shop.
“No,” Thrór said. He handed Thorin a stack of papers. “Read through these and sign them for me, will you?”
Thorin spent the next half-hour buried in the household accounts. He fidgeted whenever a servant appeared, popping up just behind his shoulder to return Thrór’s favorite hunting dog from its grooming or to clear away the remains of the afternoon tea. Thorin kept a guilty hand over the more damning numbers; there were staggeringly large sums of money involved. He was just rechecking the totals of the last page of the report when Thrór broke their companionable silence.
“Do you remember being six years old?” he asked. “I remember you being six years old. Always wandering off to places you shouldn’t be, and following me around like a miniature shadow. You hardly said a word to anyone except your mother until Frerin was born, and then you decided it was your job to boss everyone into looking after him.”
Thorin shifted, blushing a little. There was photograph on Thrór’s desk of a little boy with wide dark eyes watching the King’s Guards on parade, his chubby little hand by his forehead in a rigid salute. Sometimes he stared at it, trying to see something of himself in that small, silent toddler.
“You used to climb up on my throne and read your books there,” Thrór continued, looking at Thorin fondly over his reading spectacles. “And play at being king.”
“Yes,” Thorin said. He could hardly deny it.
Thrór hummed thoughtfully. “What if you had been? King, that is. Six years old and king of Erebor.”
Thorin tried to think of it and couldn’t quite manage it. He could hardly imagine being king now, though the idea often nagged at him. Never mind that his grandfather might live another thirty years, and his father another thirty after that; it was entirely possible that Thorin would live and die as crown prince, and never inherit.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose Uncle Fundin would have looked after things until I was older.”
“Suppose your uncle was dead, too. Suppose all our family was dead, and you were the last one left. Suppose Nain wasn’t Duke of the Iron Hills.”
Thorin didn’t say anything.
“That’s what happened in Doriath,” Thrór said, and returned to his reading. “Twice, now. When Thingol’s empire collapsed after his assassination, his family fled the country. So did his nobles—the ones that had somewhere to go. Oropher was the only one of the lot without any connections to speak of, and then came the war. He died. So his son was made king, six years old, in the middle of a gutted and grasping court. For a decade we all lied through our teeth and pretended that a friendless little boy was king of Eryn Galen. I suppose the boy just got tired of pretending.”
Thorin knew that. His history tutor wrote expressive, flowery notes on his essays, which were always meticulously researched and typed and usually had an abundance of footnotes. But to hear his grandfather talk about it, so simple and matter-of-fact, made him feel strange. “He’s barely four years older than me,” he said, staring down at his hands. “Only seventeen. Even now.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him. Your father’s quite right. He’s dangerous. An alcoholic vengeful teenage boy, sitting on the throne of country that could strangle one-half of our trade across the mountains. But…” he trailed off.
“Yes?” Thorin said.
“But I knew Oropher. The kings of the north, they called us.” He handed Thorin another stack of papers. “Well, it turned out well for one of us, I suppose. Sign these, will you?”
4.
The next time Thorin and Thranduil met, it was at a funeral.
Thorin was a colonel in the army, wearing a black uniform dripping with medals and jeweled ribbons. He had earned neither the rank nor the decorations; they belonged to the crown prince of Erebor, and Thrór had been blown to pieces by an anarchist ten days earlier.
They met again a year later, at Thráin’s formal coronation.
Thorin didn’t give a damn about him either time. He had more important things to worry about.
(When the rebellion came, Thráin swore that every sovereign kingdom on the continent would rise to his defense. Thorin, more clear-eyed than his father, knew that they were standing on the wrong side of history. The old autocracies were being swept away—replaced one by one by men in shirtsleeves, arguing in newspapers and houses of parliament. Gondor’s steward was no more than a figurehead; the behemoth of the Haradrian Empire was crumbling. The academics in Lindon and Imladris were writing books full of words like republic and dissolution and sovereignty, and it was common knowledge that their high king read such book with a great and tolerant interest.
When the rebellion came, the rest of the world stood back and watched. The unrest in Ered Mithrin blossomed into a long bloody grinding war, and while Erebor was occupied, the papers in other parts of the world starting writing short little articles about a popular Gondorian officer who had turned rogue and was stirring up trouble on the borders of Harad.
His name, according to his old military records, was Colonel Sauron Annatar.)
5.
Thorin came of age on the battlefield, watching as his commanding officer was blown to bits in front of him.
His regiment had been ordered to recapture a small town that spanned the Celduin. There were five bridges in the town, all of them old stone relics of the past century, and all of them invaluable for moving troops, tanks, and munitions. Less than six hours later, they had the town—they had the town—when a message from the divisional HQ, coded urgent, crackled through the radio.
The brigadier general listened, his face closed off and grave. Then he gestured Thorin forward, and Thorin knew before he said a word.
“The king is missing,” he said, and Thorin was so blank and cold with pain that he didn’t see the tears in the general’s eyes. “Possibly captured. Probably dead. The Queen is ordering you back to the capital.”
“I’m needed here,” Thorin said. “My company—”
“I’ll look after your men,” he said. “Prince Thorin, I’m sorrier than I can say about your father. But you need to go. The queen’s messengers will take you to the rearguard, and General Fundin will see you safely escorted to the capital.”
Thorin stood, frozen, for a long desperate moment. This could not possibly be happening. Not now. Emperor and Autocrat of all the North, King of Erebor, Dale, Celduin, Ered Mithrin, Ered Luin, Heir of the Iron Hills, Duke of Khazad-dûm, Nogrod, Belegost—
“Yes, sir,” he said, with great difficulty. The revolutionaries had demanded exile, not execution, for the royal family. But for the last six months the war had been prosecuted largely by the Rhûnish army, and commanded by a foreigner who called himself Smaug. He would issue a general order for Thorin’s capture or death, if he hadn’t already. It was no secret where Thorin was stationed.
He swallowed hard. “May I say, sir—it’s been an honor.”
The general, sixty years old, who had cheated shamelessly every time he played cards with Thrór and fought in every major battle since the siege of Khazad-dûm, knelt. He offered up his sword, and Thorin took it woodenly. “We’ll look after your kingdom,” he said. “All of us. For as long as it takes.”
“I won’t disappoint you,” Thorin managed. He felt sick. “I won’t—” And then the queen’s messengers were hurrying him along, and Captain Dori was handing him a standard issue canvas rucksack, saying “it’s all in here, your highness, don’t you worry,” and then—
Then a twelve-inch shell whistled through the air, shot from a siege howitzer more than ten thousand yards away, and ripped everything beyond the first bridge into a nightmare of black smoke and shrapnel. The general’s legs were gone, torn off, and the captain was screaming, but Thorin couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears.
He didn’t remember fighting the messengers, saying over and over: “I have to go back. I have to go back. I have to go back—” He didn’t remember clutching the battered rucksack at his side, or the burning of his lungs when he breathed in the acrid poisonous smoke.
By the time they made it back to HQ he could only remember the general kneeling in front of him; he realized, belatedly, that he was still holding the dead man’s sword.
6.
Thorin was a king, and then a king-in-exile. Smaug was named First Minister of the New Republic of Erebor, and then Thorin was—
Well. Nobody, really.
His uncle Nain sheltered them in the Iron Hills. Thorin sent his mother and younger brother across the continent to their provinces in Ered Luin, to a castle near the sea where they had summered as children. But his baby sister, sixteen years old and every bit as dark and determined as Thorin, refused to leave. Six months into their exile she asked Thorin permission to marry one of Nain’s favorite officers. He refused on principle, but Dís had been their grandfather’s favorite and was used to getting her way.
When he asked her why, she shrugged. “I like him,” she said. “And one of us needs to be in the business of getting heirs. It certainly won’t be you.”
Thorin met the man in question, interrogated him, and quickly realized that he was of devastatingly common stock and was a towering, bearded, lager-drinking philistine who knew every verse of every lewd marching song ever written. He was convinced that Dís could bring the stars from the heavens, if she so chose. Despite his best efforts, Thorin liked him enormously.
“Yes, yes, all right,” he said, when Dís kept badgering him about it. “You can marry him or not, as you like. I’ll write to mother.”
“She’ll cry.” Dís was gloomily prophetic. “At least we won’t be around to see it. Must we go through all that nonsense of formal proposals and a year’s engagement and a court announcement on Durin’s Day, or will you just marry us and have done with it?” She didn’t bother pointing out that they might all be dead well before Durin’s Day; it was too obvious to bother with.
“A formal proposal,” Thorin said, firmly. “And three months of courting at least. How would a midwinter ceremony suit you? There’s nothing I can offer as dowry, but I suppose he won’t mind.” If he did mind, Thorin would have something to say to him. Possibly several somethings.
“Oh, we’ll manage,” Dís said, airily. “I’ll wear grandmother’s old emeralds, to match the holly and pine, and we can burn cedar and vanilla. It’s all perfectly traditional. We won’t put Uncle Nain out a single penny, if I have anything to say about it.”
Thorin married them on midwinter, just as he had promised. The ancient rites stuck in his throat, and the words—on my honor as king, and under the watchful eyes of the North, that you may each do well by the other and bring honor to the ones who bore you—tasted sour. But Dís listened to him attentively, and when she kissed her husband her eyes were bright and wondering.
The glittering party that Nain threw for the newlyweds was the talk of the entire city. Thorin supposed that everyone wanted an excuse to celebrate; the militia was already digging ditches outside the city, and every day the trains were packed with families carrying overstuffed suitcases and children whose parents had someone to send them.
A ragged line of refugees streamed in from the western and southern villages. The remains of the regular army trained recruits and hauled enormous field guns piece by piece up the slopes behind the city.
The months dragged on. They watched. They waited. Thorin spent his days with Nain, organizing the city’s defense as best he could. He tore himself to pieces over the reports from Erebor; one by one their agents in the capital fell silent, either killed or gone into hiding. When Dís told Thorin that she was pregnant, it was the first good news any of them heard all year.
Their mother wrote that Frerin was growing restless, and that there was talk in Ered Luin of marshaling a volunteer expeditionary force to reclaim Erebor. Thorin, who had watched firsthand as Smaug tore through a hundred thousand soldiers in the span of ten bloody days, told his mother how any such expedition must necessarily end.
Before he was killed, General Fundin estimated that it would require at least half a million men to retake the capital. We must remember that when he made that prediction Smaug’s control of the city was uncertain and that his first army had been all but immobilized by our operations in Laketown.
Now his first and second armies are entrenched. His police have dampened if not destroyed the chance of an organized civilian resistance. I cannot imagine that any man with less than two million soldiers at his disposal could hope to take the city, to say nothing of keeping it.
If you wish to keep at least one of your children alive, Mama, Frerin must stay with you in Ered Luin.
I remain your loving and dutiful son—
Thorin
He didn’t bother with his titles. They weren’t worth the paper, not anymore. Thorin wasn’t a colonel, and he certainly wasn’t a king.
He was nobody.
7.
Smaug laid siege to the Iron Hills, but Thorin, Dís, and her new family escaped two days before the first tanks rolled in. Nain saw the writing on the wall and ordered his only son to go with them. Two nights after they fled the city, huddled in a freezing safe house in the foothills of Ered Mithrin, they listened to the echoes of the guns and the buzzing planes overhead. Smaug’s air superiority was absolute; there was no hope of escape that way.
“Railway howitzers,” Dain recited, watching the flashes light up the distant snowy mountain peaks. “Fifteen inch high-explosive shells, fifteen hundred pounds each. An effective range of eleven thousand five hundred yards at just over twelve hundred feet per second. They’ll bring up the siege guns next.”
Thorin sat beside him. Dain was his second cousin, and he had just turned thirteen years old. “Tell me about them,” he said.
Dain looked up at him. Another round of distant explosions made the floor tremble. Dust fell from the rafters. “If you’re trying to distract me,” he said, “that’s a stupid way to do it.”
Thorin leaned back against the wall. “Who says that you’re the one who needs distracting?” he asked.
That startled a laugh out of him, even if it was only small and brittle. “All right,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
He started with siege guns. Before he fell asleep on Thorin’s shoulder, tired and miserable, he had worked his way through naval rifles, small-caliber repeating rifles, and seven separate varieties of poisonous gasses.
“Poor kid,” Dís said, slipping out to sit beside them. Fili was nursing quietly. As far as he was concerned, the world was perfectly in order; he was warm, fed, and comfortable in his mother’s arms. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” Thorin said. “Of the two of us, I’m not the one who’s just had a baby.”
“Pah. You’re as fine as I am, which is to say not very. But I suppose there’s no point in fussing about it. Is there any word on when our escort will be here?”
“Thirty six hours on the outside, according to the captain.”
“And they’re loyal?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
Dís sat down on his other side, and he put an arm around her. The baby burped, yawned, and settled down to sleep. They didn’t say anything, but as siblings went they’d never been particularly talkative. They saw no reason to start now.
The guns crashed and echoed in the distance, and all night long the mountains flashed with the light of explosions.
8.
Then, unexpectedly, there was Thranduil. He was twenty-four, not that either of them paid attention to things like that anymore: tall and unsmiling and perfectly beautiful, even with his hair cut short and a ring of yellowing bruises visible above the high collar of his robes.
“Someone doesn’t like you,” Thorin rasped, still dazed from the blast that had derailed their train carriage and killed all but three of their escort.
Thranduil raised one perfect eyebrow. “You don’t say.”
They had escaped the front, but even two hundred miles from Erebor they still weren’t safe. Dís’ husband had taken care of the assassins. Less than an hour later, two of Thranduil’s officers picked them up and drove them through the night in an armored car, past five separate military checkpoints, to an old military base somewhat west of Amon Lanc.
Thorin didn’t understand any of it, but he had decided, on a purely provisional basis, that he wouldn’t complain too much about Thranduil’s impeccable timing. Provided that he didn’t turn them over to the New Republic, at least.
Thorin raised a hand to his own throat. “It’s not every day that someone tries to strangle a king.”
“Oh, that,” Thranduil said. “No. That was my wife.”
“Your wife,” Thorin repeated, wondering what in Aulë’s name Thranduil had done to make her want to strangle him. Then he wondered what Thranduil had done to her in return, and felt a sudden and irrational anger simmer underneath his skin. It was no concern of his if Thranduil hit the woman he’d made queen, or if she hit him back.
Thranduil smiled, amused in his gently mocking way. He had brought it to perfection in the years since he’d been seventeen. “You’ve met her sister.”
“Have I,” Thorin said, flatly.
Thranduil smiled. “Don’t look so sour, your majesty. I saved your life—and your family. I would expect you to value the latter if not the former.”
“Why did you do it?” Thorin asked. He was too tired to be diplomatic. Tired of running and hiding, his country’s death knells echoing in the distance behind him. Tired of wondering if his nephew was going to live long enough to learn to walk, or read, or shoot a rifle.
“Your father asked me to look after you,” Thranduil said. “That is to say, he wrote me a very brusque letter a few months before he found himself on the chopping block. He said that I owed him a debt. I suppose I did.”
Thorin made a disbelieving sort of noise.
“It’s no concern of yours,” Thranduil told him. “All that you need to know is that you are very much alive—congratulations, by the way, the international set had your odds at twenty to one and falling after three months on the run—and I intend to keep you that way, at least so long as you’re within my borders. There are rooms waiting for you, and another suite for the princess and her family.”
“Thank you,” Thorin said. This was another situation that his etiquette tutor hadn’t discussed, but Thorin was reasonably certain he knew what she would have said: that it had nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with common everyday politeness. “I—appreciate your generosity.”
“Appreciate it or not, as you like.” Thranduil took a sip from the glass in his hand, and Thorin felt a sudden rush of—something. “Why don’t I give you something else to be grateful for? Have a drink with me. I have an excellent bottle of Himring.”
“I doubt that Prince Maedhros had time for fine spirits: too busy killing his cousins.”
“And kissing them,” Thranduil said. “Though not usually in that order. No, the estate was inherited after the war. A distant relative, as I understand it. You have a taste for Noldorin drama?”
“But not Noldorin whiskey.” Whatever Thranduil was offering, Thorin knew better than to accept. He had no interest in making himself ridiculous. “Thangorodrim is a modern classic. Our royal theatre company produced it when I was seven.”
Thranduil actually laughed. “Did they? I’m told my father banned it from the court. He never entirely forgave Lord Elrond for commissioning it—he loved Master Lindir’s earlier plays, you see. He kept a first edition of The Swan Song of Tirion in his library, and a bound collection of his poems. ‘Anglachel’ was his favorite, I think. When I was a little boy I found an annotated copy on his desk, in his handwriting. But I suppose Thangorodrim was more than he could bear.”
For a split second, Thorin was charmed by this young king, who adored his father even from a distance of almost two decades. Thranduil had a sweet soft laugh, and for the first time Thorin realized that he spoke with the faintest hint of a Silvan accent. But then he caught himself. Thranduil was good—extraordinarily good—but he wasn’t the only one who had grown up at court. “If you’re going to amuse yourself at my expense, don’t bother. I’d rather be in bed. My own bed,” he added, for the sake of clarity.
Thranduil looked momentarily startled. Then he shrugged, a careless ripple of silk. “Of course. You may join me at breakfast to discuss your arrangements. I wouldn’t recommend anything east of the mountains at present; you have been reading the newspapers, I presume?”
“I’ve been otherwise occupied these past few days. I’m sure you understand.”
“Lord Ecthelion’s surrender is all but assured. Adrahil was routed on the Pelennor, and what’s left of his corps is retreating north to Meduseld. And Nain—”
“Yes,” said Thorin, swallowing hard. “I know about Nain.”
“I thought you might,” Thranduil said. They parted without another word, but there was a strange and sudden understanding between them. Once Rohan fell, Thranduil would be caught between two invading armies—Smaug to the east, and Sauron to the south. It was no secret that the New Republic was funding Sauron’s armies, and money and resources were pouring down the Celduin from the capital.
Soon, the fires in Eryn Galen would be burning much hotter. And, as the old proverb went, Thorin had every reason in the world to get out before the first hammer stroke fell.
9.
He had every reason in the world to leave, but he didn’t. While he dallied, communications arrived from Khazad-dûm and Ered Luin, from his lords and distant relatives, begging him to flee the north and take refuge in one of the provinces. Even in the ugliest weeks of the revolution, the great ducal houses had kept faith with Thráin, a stubborn wall of old aristocracy. The calls and letters from his mother were the worst, increasingly frantic as the weeks slipped by.
“If we leave, we’ll never come back,” Dís said, tossing the daily newspaper onto the table. FIRST MINISTER CONVICTS TWO HUNDRED LINE OFFICERS OF COWARDICE; SUPREME COUNCIL OF THE ARMED FORCES DECLARES AN END TO HOSTILITIES IN GONDOR.
“Dís—”
“And don’t look at me like that. You know it as well as I do.”
“They don’t want us back,” Thorin said. There was a painting on the wall, a primeval forest faded though a veil of rain and mist: oil on canvas by one of the old masters of Doriath. In the upper right hand corner, the artist’s messy scrawl read Dor-Cúarthol. Thorin brushed his fingers against the heavy gilt frame, eyes fixed on the tumbledown castle just visible through the dripping trees.
(“The Land of Helm and Bow,” Thranduil had translated once. “My godfather’s estate. He was an intelligence agent during the war.”)
Thorin turned away. “They don’t want us.”
“No,” Dís said. She nodded at the headline. “But they don’t want him, either.”
Thorin straightened up, rubbing his hands briskly over his bare arms. Amon Lanc was a cold steel complex of buildings, mostly underground, comfortably familiar to the military mind. “Give me gold and guns from Erebor / and ten thousand loyal men,” he said. “Was it ever that easy?”
“You know, I never did like that poem.”
Thorin sat down beside her, abstracted. He drummed his fingers against the table for a few minutes, then leapt to his feet again and began pacing.
“Even if the rumors are true, and the Fourth Army does relieve Annatar at Cair Andros, Smaug still has more than thirty divisions, ten of them massed along the border,” he said. “If I mobilized every reservist in the provinces, from Khazad-dûm to Ered Luin—”
“You would have five hundred thousand at most,” she said. “Inexperienced officers, shoddy gear. The provincial governors have field pieces for museums, not modern war.”
Thorin made a strangled noise of frustration. “Give me something, Dís. Anything. You’re the clever one, aren’t you?”
“And you’re the colonel,” Dís said, “but that doesn’t make either of us miracle workers. I can’t draft you battle plans or soldiers, brother.”
Something in Thorin cracked, then. It had been a long time coming. Five years ago, to the day, he’d watched his grandfather bleed out on a city street. “Excuse me,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I have to go speak to Thranduil.”
“About what?” Dís asked.
He smiled a little, humorlessly, and told her. Then she was smiling too.
“Battle plans and soldiers,” she said again, in an entirely different tone of voice. “Do you want to telegraph Mama, or shall I?”
10.
Dís telegraphed. Thorin was busy pleading their case to Thranduil.
Rohan, reinforced by the survivors of Cair Andros and the Pelennor, would keep Sauron occupied at least until late autumn, and by then it would be too late for serious military operations, at least beyond the Sea of Rhûn. Winters in the north were miserable for everyone, especially invading armies. The west was already mobilizing; by spring the High King would have his reinforcements from Númenor and he could either cross the mountains or hold them. In the meantime, the East had that most precious of all military advantages—time.
Every division that Smaug kept stationed at the border was one less division he could divert south to reinforce Sauron. And if Smaug could be kept just busy enough—if they could force a withdrawal from Cair Andros and Minas Tirith—
Thranduil listened attentively to Thorin’s speech, thanked him politely for the proposal, and spent the next three days locked in his study. Just when Thorin thought he might go mad, driven to distraction by the endless waiting, one of Thranduil’s servants arrived with a message written on a scrap of notebook paper.
I want a new economic treaty. And possibly the crown jewels of Erebor; I haven’t decided yet.
Thorin spent the next month buried in piles of maps of reports, shouting back and forth at Thranduil’s generals and occasionally at Thranduil himself. In between their bouts of temper, they produced three separate plans for invasion, tore them all to shreds, and started over again. They let Dain pick out the names of the operations, which at least made for good entertainment.
“Operation Barrel Rider,” Thranduil read aloud. “Oh, dear. What are we planning to do, find the nearest enemy officer and—”
“Don’t,” Thorin said, hitting him on the arm with a set of rolled-up maps. “Listen to this. Operation Sting. Operation Attercop. Operation—what does this even mean?—Tomnoddy.”
“It means fool, I think,” said a passing aide-de-camp. He handed Thranduil a mug of something hot. “One of those words you read in old songs and the like.”
“Oh, good,” Thorin said. “I’m so glad that we’ll go down in history as the masterminds behind Operation Foolhardy.”
Thranduil took a sip from his gently steaming mug. “Mhm, yes. But think of the delicious irony.”
“It’s only ironic if we win. On the subject of which, my brother swears that he can have half a million men here by March, as long as the trains keep running.”
“They will. I received this from the Grand Duchess last evening.”
Thorin scanned the telegram that Thranduil pushed across the table. His eyes widened slightly. “This is extraordinarily generous of her. Do you know this advisor she’s offering us? This—” he squinted at the unfamiliar name “—Gandalf?”
“We’ve met. He’s very clever.”
High praise, coming from Thranduil. “Well, then. And what about that agent of yours, the one in Laketown?”
“It’s been—difficult,” Thranduil said. “The town’s master is not a trusting man. He has spies of his own, to say nothing of the military police. According to my officer, there are at least three separate intelligence networks operating in that district, and possibly as many as five. But his earliest reports haven’t been entirely discouraging. The loyalist movement is strong enough that Smaug has dedicated his entire Ministry of Internal Security to weeding them out.”
Thorin dragged a hand over his gritty eyes. Somewhere in Erebor there were people fighting for his family. For him. There were people risking torture and execution for his sake, and here he was sitting comfortably in a base five hundred miles away. “Right,” he said. “Let’s keep at it, shall we?”
“We shall. Wake General Calendî ,” Thranduil told the aide-de-camp. “If we’re going to stay up all night we might as well spread the misery around. And bring me another pot of tea.”
11.
Laketown. The name was misleading; it was the third-largest city in Erebor, with a peacetime population of just under half a million and the largest concentration of industrial factories anywhere in the country. It sprawled out from the endless grey shores of the lake, towering white apartment buildings and two-story inns only a generation removed from thatched roofs. There was the orchestra, almost as good as the King’s Own, and libraries and museums, and five hundred acres of fountains and forests—the sort of broad green parks that summer afternoons dreamt of. It was the cultural and intellectual capital of Erebor.
One hundred sixteen days into Operation Sting, the city was a pile of rubble, bombed to the Void by air raids. Columns of black smoke rose from the refineries, and machine gun fire stuttered through the ruins.
Smaug’s army had wiped out all but three pockets of resistance east of the Celduin: three blocks of the factory district, an apartment building across from the King’s Park, and a quarter-mile of frozen waterfront near the mouth of the river. Thranduil, fighting in the city after a catastrophic string of bad luck, was in the first of these. Thorin, fighting in the city entirely of his own stubborn accord, was in the second. Neither of them was entirely certain who was commanding the third, but according to recent reports it was either a marksman from the city militia, a foreign intelligence agent, or a fourteen-year-old civilian girl.
All things considered, it had not been a good year.
“Fuck this city and fuck the Rhûns and fuck this whole fucking war, you stupid fucks—” one of Thorin’s soldiers hurtled a grenade out a broken window at a squad of approaching enemy troops. There was a bang and then a high shrill screaming voice. “Fucking rats.”
“Well, maybe we’re all rats,” said the man crouched behind him. They were cousins, the last two survivors of the 17nd Guards Company, and they had been stationed together since their train left the station in Ered Luin. “But that’s Lieutenant Rat to you.”
Thorin grimaced. It was an apt description. In the first days and weeks of the counterattack, they had been soldiers: fighting men, killing men. Now they were starving, scrabbling in the rubble and creeping through sewers in the long lethal nights.
“Bofur, get one of your lads on the roof,” Thorin said, clapping the lieutenant on the back. “I want someone on the tank killer. And tell Ori to hurry it up out there, will you? We can’t cover him forever.”
“Laying mines is tricky business,” Bofur said. Ori was the baby of their makeshift little platoon. Everyone was always leaping to his defense, at least when they weren’t busy making fun of his knitting.
Thorin looked at him and raised his eyebrows.
Bofur went to do as he was told.
“Sir, we’ve got—” Dwalin squinted through his binoculars “—two tanks and a squadron coming up on our six.”
“The lieutenant is taking care of it,” Thorin said, at the precise moment that the lead tank ground to a halt in a burst of gunfire and smoke. The new anti-tank rifles gave them a kill zone eight hundred yards around the apartment building, at least when the fucking things didn’t jam up. “Would you like to give him a hand?”
Dwalin grinned, large and unpleasant. He was missing three teeth, and didn’t look very much like the younger brother of a duke. “Always a pleasure, your majesty, Thorin, sir.”
Thorin would never willingly admit it, but he had missed his cousins. He grinned back. “Knock ‘em dead, your lordship."
It had been a surreal moment: crawling out of the buried cellars after the first hours of bombing and finding Dwalin among the soldiers who had dug him out. The last time Thorin had seen him and his older brother, their father the Duke had still been alive. Their trials and executions had been announced along with the rest of the surrendered nobles when the capital was taken; Thorin had assumed they were both long dead.
“Oh, we’ve been here and there,” Balin had said when Thorin asked him about it. “Before we left the city Dwalin picked up a clever little lad, handy with explosions. He was looking for his brothers, and he knew a dozen different places where a few careful souls might hide and stay hidden. We managed well enough.”
The last Thorin heard of it, Balin had gone back to the capital to stir things up there. But Dwalin stayed with Thorin, and Ori stayed with Dwalin.
“One big happy family,” Dwalin liked to say. “With lots and lots of guns.”
There was a clatter somewhere underneath their feet, and muffled conversation. Thorin turned from the barricaded window to see a grimy little girl clamber out from the hole in the floor. “Hello, Tauriel,” he said. “How are the factories today?”
“Oh, passing fair,” she said. She was probably thirteen or fourteen, but three months of hunger, scavenging, and crawling through sewers had taken their toll. She was so skinny that in peacetime it would have been painful to look at her. “Quiet up here, isn’t it?”
“It’s been a slow day. Any messages?” They had radios, of course, but the enemy interceptors and code breakers were good. Very good. Anyone who said that Smaug was stupid had obviously never tried to kill him.
She ticked them off on her fingers. “Reinforcements made it through: ammunition and two of the new siege guns. Fifteen inch shells, which should make things exciting for anyone on the wrong side of the river. Prince Frerin says ‘happy birthday’. As of yesterday he’s still pinned down a hundred miles west of the Carnen, but according to HQ at East Bight he’ll have six fresh divisions by the end of the month.”
Thorin nodded. “I’ll take it. Anything else?”
She fidgeted a little “Nothing. Only—King Thranduil wants to know if you could spare a doctor.”
“I don’t have a doctor,” Thorin said. “Killed three days ago. Why?”
Tauriel’s lips compressed. For a moment she looked very much like her mother. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, after the briefest of pauses. “Just the usual. Anything you want me to tell his majesty?”
Thorin rattled off a handful of messages that he couldn’t trust to the radios. Tauriel listened carefully, repeated everything back to him, and then slipped down into the sewers. He could hear her talking with the guards, and then she was gone.
“Her boyfriend probably got shot,” Dwalin said, not unsympathetically. “They’ve had it rough down at the factories, from the sound of it.”
“Yes,” Thorin said, absently. His mind was already on other things: calculating and recalculating the distance between Frerin’s army and the city, and silently willing his brother to hurry.
12.
Miles away, Thranduil was sitting on the floor of what had once been a factory office, listening to the shuddering booms of the big guns as they fired. It was no good firing into the city, where you were as likely to kill your own soldiers as the enemy’s. But the anti-aircraft guns were always busy during the daytime, and whenever divisions massed to the east of the city, twelve- and fifteen-inch howitzers tore them to shreds.
For the moment, he was alone. His aide-de-camp had decided that he should best resting, which amused him enormously. Get shot and suddenly everyone knew best. He closed his eyes and mapped out their section of the city in his mind, block by ruined block.
It was a perfect killing ground, and his soldiers had learned how to take advantage of it. The nights belonged to them.
He heard the sound of a familiar knock, and then an even more familiar voice. Tauriel. The guards let her through. She slipped inside, bolting the heavy steel door behind her.
“What happened to you?” Thranduil demanded, sitting straight up. Or as straight up as the alcohol and the bullet would allow him. They’d run out of painkillers a few days ago, but one of the soldiers had come up with the clever idea of running industrial alcohol through the carbon filters of their gas masks.
It would probably kill him, but then, so would the bullet.
“I almost got caught,” she said. “But only almost, so don’t worry. He only grabbed me by the throat a little. I didn’t have anything on me, anyway, except my knife.”
“What did you do to him?”
She shrugged. “I had my knife.”
Thranduil leaned back, wincing. “Good. You know, I used to think getting strangled was fun. In the right context, as it were. But I suppose you’re too young for that.”
“Probably. And I don’t think this is the right context.” Tauriel grabbed her notebook and a stubby piece of charcoal. She always started copying down her messages right away. There were usually dozens of them, and Thranduil had impressed on her the importance of writing them down precisely as they’d been given to her.
“No,” said Thranduil. He thought vaguely of his wife. Since their marriage they had never been apart for more than a few weeks at a time. He hadn’t realized how much their separation would hurt—how the ache of missing her would weigh him down, settling into his veins like sediment. “Neither do I.”
“Your majesty?” Her voice was distant, faded. “It’s 1800. Do you want me to call in the officers?”
“Yes,” Thranduil said, forcing his eyes open with an enormous effort of will. “Yes, do. We need to talk about the counter-attack.”
“Um. Your majesty,” she said, hesitantly.
Thranduil laughed, coughed, and spat up blood. “Don’t worry. I’m not delirious,” he said. “If Prince Frerin can break through, his army will be here in a month. We need to be ready. If we can trap them between the prince and the city, we’ve won.”
“What if the prince doesn’t break through?” she said.
“Then by January we’ll all be captured or killed, and it won’t matter.” As far as the king was concerned, it wouldn’t matter either way. Every time he moved, he felt the bullet grind against flesh and bone. But a dying king was still a king, and Thranduil knew his duty.
13.
Thorin looked down at the body on the bed, his lips parted in shock.
“How long?” he demanded, when he had composed himself enough to speak. “How long has he been like this?”
“Ten days,” Tauriel said. She was sitting at Thranduil’s side, an emaciated guard dog with a gun close to hand. “He didn’t want anyone to know. He thought it would be bad for morale.”
“We would have gotten him out,” Thorin said. “We could have gotten him across the river at night.”
“He didn’t want to leave. He thought, if he was going to die, he wanted it to be here. He would have hated himself otherwise.”
Two days ago, the enemy had surged, breaking through the line in half a dozen places. The generals across the river had organized a counter-attack, but not before Thorin’s platoon had been forced out of their makeshift fortress. He and his surviving soldiers had fought their way back to the factories street by street. Thorin had expected to find a devastatingly well-organized defense—Thranduil digging his heels into the ground and refusing to take even a single step back, no matter how much firepower Smaug’s soldiers threw at them—and he’d found exactly that.
He just hadn’t expected to be told that the king was dying while he fought.
“We need to find a doctor,” Thorin said. “I’ll take charge of the defenses from here, until we can find a proper headquarters. Radio the field hospitals and tell them to send someone.”
“They bomb every vehicle crossing the ice,” one of Thranduil’s officers said. “And we’ve mined the water. It’s suicide.”
“So tell them to swim,” Thorin snapped. “I don’t care what it takes. I want a doctor here in twenty-four hours, is that understood?”
“But it’s not—” the officer looked down at Thranduil, biting her lip. Then her voice hardened. “Yes, sir. Understood.”
But no doctors came. Three had tried to make the crossing and died in the attempt; the fourth, when given his orders, flatly told the soldiers that they would have to shoot him; he wouldn’t leave his patients.
Instead the Grand Duchess’ advisor appeared as if by magic some hours before dawn, dripping wet and highly affronted. “Get me a change of clothes,” he said, looking around as if the soldiers crowding near had personally offended him. “And something to drink, for Eru’s sake. I certainly didn’t come all this way to die of hypothermia.”
Half a dozen soldiers scrambled to obey him. Gandalf—that was his name—had apparently been a renowned physician at one point in his long and varied career. He conscripted two radio technicians as assistants and shooed every else out of his improvised hospital room.
Thorin leaned against the wrong side of the reinforced door, his hands and forehead pressed to the cold metal. He couldn’t hear anything happening inside, but somehow it made him feel better to be nearby.
“Please don’t die,” he said, abruptly. No one was around to hear. “Thranduil—”
He cursed his own stupidity and walked away. The wait that followed dragged on for a small eternity, even for men who were used to war. All of the officers who weren’t on duty and a handful who were had crowded together in the map room. Some of them were pacing. Most of them were sitting in chairs or on the floor. A few were playing cards. But no one spoke.
When Gandalf finally emerged, it was only with news of another, longer wait. Yes, Thranduil was still alive. Yes, the surgery had gone well. No, he wasn’t awake, and if he had any sense he wouldn’t be awake for a good long while.
Yes, of course there was infection, that’s what you got when you ran around a war zone with a bullet in your thigh.
But soon Thranduil was conscious again, or at least conscious enough to listen to reports and make angry noises. Whenever Thorin could spare a minute, which wasn’t often, he sat at his bedside, drawing up battle plans just as they’d done in Amon Lanc so many months ago. But they understood war better now, and they spent rather less time shouting at one another.
“There’s word,” he said one day. His voice was ragged, and his heart beat high and wild in his chest. “Frerin and his generals have broken through the enemy lines, cut them off. They’ve come for us.”
Thranduil was silent for a moment, considering. Then he said: “We’re going to win.”
“Yes.”
“We could survive this.”
Thorin only nodded. It would have felt like tempting fate to speak.
When Frerin finally made it to his brother’s new headquarters, he was so filthy that even Thorin, who knew he was coming and was desperate to see him, didn’t recognize him. “I’ve spent this entire morning diving into ditches,” the prince said, blankly. “A sniper shot my chief of staff. I thought we controlled this part of the city.”
Thorin crossed the room in two enormous strides and yanked his brother into a hug. “Frerin,” he said. “Frerin.”
“I missed you,” Frerin said, burying his face against Thorin’s shoulder. He was shaking, just a little. “But, Thorin—”
“I know,” Thorin said. “We’ll talk later.”
Dwalin, leaning up against the map table, waved cheerfully. “Good to see you, cousin. Welcome to the Laketown Academy of Street Fighting.”
Frerin grinned, but talk turned serious after that. They hadn’t won—not yet.
14.
The first time Thorin saw Thranduil after the war, Thorin had just proposed marriage. But not, thankfully, to Thranduil, who would only have laughed and poured him another glass of whatever they were drinking.
No, Thorin had proposed to some distant relative of the Thain of the Shire, a thoroughly useless young man named Bilbo Baggins whose only advantages were that he was nominally a commoner—that sort of thing was popular these days, and the royals of Erebor needed all the help they could get—and that his country was peaceful, prosperous, and abundantly rich in resources.
It was Thorin’s mother who had suggested the match. According to her, the people of the Shire had been enormously kind to the refugees and exiles from Erebor; she and the Thain had spent many comfortable afternoons talking about the state of the world, and young people these days, and would you like to see a photograph of my grandson?
It was all awfully, gruesomely pedestrian, and by the time Thorin had managed to escape the congratulatory banquet he was drunk and miserable. He stumbled out onto a balcony and stared out over the lights of the city, the golden glow of a thousand houses and streetlamps blurring his vision. Some of the outer districts were still blacked out, and it would be months, at least, before the last of the rubble was cleared away. Probably years.
But it was home, and he was king.
Besides, after months of war rations the banquet itself had gone off rather well. Since the peace had been signed with Sauron the trains were finally running from Gondor again, and the worst of the food shortages were already over. Everywhere you looked, people were brandishing their newspapers at one another, as if every paper on the continent wasn’t running precisely the same story: a full-page photograph of the High King, flanked by cousins, watching impassively while the war criminal Sauron Annatar signed his unconditional surrender. Occasionally Thorin wondered if they shouldn’t have just shot him and been done with it.
(Smaug, on the other hand, was very, very dead. It had been a marksman from one of the city militias who killed him, in the end. Thorin fancied he slept better at night for it.)
Thorin heard footsteps, light but uneven, and the rustling of heavy robes as someone joined him on the balcony. He didn’t have to look up to see who it was.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” Thranduil said. He was still limping, though he didn’t carry a cane anymore. “But I thought you might like some company.”
Thorin shrugged, and took the mug that Thranduil offered him. He took a large swig, then frowned. “Tea?” he said. He’d been expecting something stronger.
“If you drink any more whisky tonight you’ll throw up all over my robes,” Thranduil said. “Take my word for it.”
Thorin set the mug aside. “You would know, wouldn’t you.”
There were so many things they had never talked about, he realized. It had never bothered him before, but now—after everything they had done together, all those months in Laketown—
“Why did you owe my father a favor?” he asked.
Thranduil didn’t look at Thorin. Instead, he propped his arms against the balustrade and leaned out, looking over the city much as Thorin had just done. “You don’t want to know that.”
Thorin still didn’t understand. Maybe that didn’t matter anymore. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. He hadn’t survived six months in a city under siege because he ignored his sense of danger.
“No,” said Thranduil. “I don’t. But I suppose I will, eventually. Have you read through the details of the alliance that your Duke Fundin is proposing?”
“All two hundred pages of it. I do read everything I sign, you know.”
The corners of Thranduil’s mouth curled up. “You’ll grow out of that habit, I can assure you. What did you think of it?”
“It’s a good proposal,” Thorin said. “But they’re already calling us the kings of the north. We’ve fought a war together. A name and a piece of paper won’t change anything.”
“Won’t it?” Thranduil asked. “Well. Maybe we should give it a better name than that. How about—oh, I don’t know—”
“Operation Barrel Rider,” Thorin suggested, trying and failing to keep a straight face.
Thranduil laughed. It was a lovely sound, Thorin realized, not for the first time. And not nearly as disingenuous as he’d once thought. “I’ll have to tell that story to your fiancé,” he said. “Whenever he arrives.”
“You wouldn’t,” Thorin said, which was of course precisely the wrong thing to say. There were very few things Thranduil wouldn’t do, given the chance.
They stood in silence for a while.
“Dís is pregnant again,” said Thorin, presently. “She’s due in August.”
“My congratulations,” Thranduil said. “An heir and a spare. How fortunate.”
Thorin contemplated dumping the mug of tea on him, but decided against it. He had some dim notion that those robes had once belonged to Thranduil’s father. “Yes, well. We were thinking, Dís and I, and it occurred to us—” he cleared his throat. “That is, if you were interested. Well. We thought you might agree to be the godfather.”
Thranduil stared at him, flatly. “You want me to be directly involved in raising an innocent child.”
“Yes,” Thorin said.
“The treacherous, power hungry little brat; the drunken tyrant who killed his father’s best friend. You want me—”
“Yes.” Thorin didn’t bother telling him that he wasn’t any of those things, not anymore. If he knew, there was no point. If he didn’t, nothing Thorin could say would convince him. “It would mean a great deal to us,” he added.
“Well,” Thranduil said, after a thunderous pause. “If you’re quite certain.”
“I’ve known you since I was ten years old,” said Thorin. “I think I know what I’m getting myself into.”
They stood there, leaning against the balustrade, until the last notes of the music indoors had faded away. The lights of the city flickered out until only the streetlights remained.
The northern kings looked like statues, silent and still, except for the rustling of robes and the occasional sip of stone cold tea.