The Wandering Elf

They walked for days and slept only a few precious hours by campfire at night. Traveling over hills and plateaus, passed lakes and waterfalls, each day felt like stepping into entire new worlds to Ara. Despite Thorin’s relentless pace, she never thought to complain; she was seeing landscapes and animals she never imagined she’d see, and though she wished she had more time to commit them to memory, she was grateful all the same.

Often, when she spotted Ori scribbling down notes and sketches in his notebook, she spoke with him. He was quite a scholarly and polite dwarf, and he seemed to know every fact about even the most obscure subjects. When Ara asked him about an animal she was unfamiliar with, he’d prattle on and on, even if she stopped listening. He was a living library, she’d decided.

“You know,” she told him once, “if you were an elf, you’d love lessons.”

He’d beamed proudly and began scrawling in his notebook even more frantically.

When she wasn’t speaking with Ori, she often walked in silence near the back of the company. Kíli and Fíli were almost always up front by Thorin. She’d begun to notice things about the two brothers: how, no matter what Fíli was doing, he always watched out for Kíli, and how Kíli seemed constantly to be seeking Thorin’s approval. Whenever he did something helpful, like call out a warning or shoot something down for them to eat, he always looked at Thorin, as if he was waiting for his uncle to acknowledge that he’d done well. There were times when Thorin would offer Kíli a small, curt nod of approval, and she’d see how Kíli would stand a little straighter, walk with a bit more confidence.

Ara didn’t understand why, but it annoyed her immensely.

She was beginning to dislike Thorin very much, and she suspected they would never get along. She didn’t quite know the words to accurately describe their mutual contempt, but luckily I, with my helpful twenty-first century vernacular, do.

If Ara had been born in more modern times, she might say that Thorin was Scrooge and she was Christmas. He was President Snow and she was Katniss. He was a Death Eater and she was a happy, vibrant soul.

In any and all cases, they just didn’t get on.

Whenever they set up camp at night, he never allowed her to have a shift on watch, though she had better sight and hearing than any dwarf. When the dwarves slept bunched together for warmth, and Kíli tried to convince her to sleep near them, she’d catch Thorin’s watchful eyes on her and shake her head.

For days and days it continued in this manner until Ara began to wonder if it had been a wise decision for her to come after all.

When the sun was setting on the ninth day, their journey lead them into an evergreen forest near the base of the Misty Mountains. They were beautiful, the mountains, with their snow-capped peaks and intimidating height, but she saw dozens and dozens of them in the distance, and she wondered if it was even possible for them to be crossed.

“We will camp here and continue in the morning,” Thorin said, dropping his weapons to the ground.

They were in a clearing, small enough that they wouldn’t be easily spotted, but big enough for them to rest comfortably.

Immediately the dwarves set off in different directions, each handling a different task. Ara and Bilbo were left standing awkwardly amidst all the movement, for Thorin never assigned either of them a job. Shrugging, Bilbo dropped his walking stick on the ground and sank to the grass, frowning at his blackened feet.

Deciding it was only fair for her to attend to her needs as everyone was attending theirs, Ara trudged into the forest.

“Oi, Ara!” Fíli called after her, a heap of firewood in his arms. “Where are you goin’?”

“Er…I need to…uh—”

“Modesty is wasted on us, lass.”

“Fine, then. I need to pee.”

He unceremoniously dumped the firewood into the center of the clearing. “Stay close to camp, yeah? If you need help, hoot twice like a barn owl an’—”

“—once like a screech owl, I know,” she said with a wave over her shoulder to show she’d heard him.

She ventured deeper into the forest than she should have. Wasted modesty or no, she was not keen on the idea of a dwarf discovering her mid-pee.

She was in the process of re-arranging her trousers when she heard rustling in the trees above her. She froze, her hands still on the waistband of her pants.

“Hello?” she whispered, as if whatever was prowling would bounce out from the bushes and introduce itself.

All she heard in response was more rustling. She’d been told once that in situations like this, the most intelligent thing to do was stay absolutely still and silent. She strongly considered testing this theory by sprinting back to camp, screaming. Maybe if she was fast enough—

“What are you doin’ all the way out here?” a voice said behind her.

She didn’t answer, couldn’t really, for she was shrieking so loudly that birds in nearby pine trees squawked in surprise and flew off.

“Shh!” A hand clamped over her mouth. “It’s just me! Kíli!”

It was too late; already she heard fast-approaching footsteps. Soon, all twelve other dwarves circled her and Kíli, weapons drawn. Bilbo burst through the foliage a moment later, wide-eyed and brandishing his walking stick like a spear.

Seeing Kíli’s hand over Ara’s mouth, Fíli sighed and lowered his sword. “That was nothing like a barn owl or a screech owl,” he said to Ara. “More like a bloody banshee, it was!”

Ignoring him, Ara glared up at Kíli and snapped, “Werf ou wafin mm ee!”

Brows drawn in, Kili frowned, not removing his hand from her mouth. “Sorry? Couldn’t quite catch that.”

She kicked him as hard as she could.

“Ouch!” he yelped, clutching his knee with both hands.

“Kíli,” Thorin snapped. “Quiet! Who knows what beasts you two attract with all this noise!”

“But she kicked me! In the shin!”

Thorin stared blankly at him.

“The shin, Thorin!” Still holding his knee and looking adorably offended, he said to Ara, “What the bloody hell was that for!”

“Were you watching me pee!” she accused.

Thorin looked up at the darkened sky and dragged a hand down his face. All at once, he and the other dwarves turned back to camp. Some glared before they went, some merely shook their heads. Ara heard Dori sadly mutter, “I was almost asleep!”

“Well?” she prodded, hands on her hips. “Were you?”

“No!” Kíli answered indignantly. “I was not watchin’ you pee. I was scoutin’.” He lifted himself back onto the branch he’d swung out of, grumbling, “Thinkin’ I was watchin’ her pee. Why would anyone want to watch—”

“Scouting?” Ara repeated, her anger forgotten. She watched him skillfully climb higher and higher. “Can you teach me? To climb, I mean. I never have before.”

Hanging down from a thick branch like a sodding monkey, he grinned. “’Course I can!”

Still upside down, he pointed at the base of the tree. “First,” he instructed, “you have to make sure it can bear your weight. See that branch over there? Go on, then. Test it out.”

She warily placed one foot on the branch, grinning when it creaked but didn’t break. “What next?” she asked.

“That branch there. It’s a bit high so you might have to—”

She leapt and grabbed the branch.

“—jump,” he finished, chuckling.

Over confident, she reached for the next one with too-eager hands. With a loud crack that echoed through the forest, it snapped. She would’ve plummeted to the ground if Kíli hadn’t scrambled down and helped her right her balance.

“Rule number one, lass. Don’t forget it,” he said.

With his hand warm on the center of her back, he guided her the rest of the way up. Finally, arms aching and breathless, she made it to the top unscathed. She stood at the junction of the branch and tree, awkwardly hugging the rough bark of the trunk. Kíli crouched down on the branch beside hers. His hair blending into the brown of the bark and hidden by pine needles, he was practically invisible. He gently grabbed her wrist and tugged her down next to him.

His hand was only on her for a fleeting moment, but she felt the imprint of warmth he left there and on her back, and she was surprised by how strongly she wanted him to touch her again. She sidled closer so that her shoulder touched his. Imagining that his heat was seeping from his shoulder and spreading across the rest of her body, she immediately relaxed. She felt perfectly and comfortably warm.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Kíli’s surprised sideways glance at her. This was the first time she’d initiated any sort of contact with him. For a second she worried she’d perhaps crossed some type of friendship boundary she hadn’t known about, but he leaned into her as well, so that they were both supporting each other’s weight.

Satisfied, she turned her attention away from him to the forest. She’d never been that high up before. She wasn’t able to see very far out; the trees were much too dense for that, but it was a new point a view and she was fascinated. Kíli watched her eyes dart back and forth, drinking in the sights around her faster than a dwarf could drink ale.

“What are you scouting for,” she whispered when she’d had her fill.

“Supper,” he answered. “Trick is to stay really still and then…”

He pulled his bow from his back, and so quickly his hands were a blur, he shot an arrow.

She heard something hit the forest floor with a heavy thud, and suddenly she felt very, very nauseous.

“I think I saw some berries on the way here,” she said, swallowing bile that had risen in her throat. “I’m going to go pick some.”

Pulling away from him, she frowned when her usual chill swept across her skin like spilled ink across parchment.

“Alright,” he said, scanning the trees for another poor, unsuspecting animal to shoot. “Careful goin’ down. Mind where you place your feet.”

She almost made it down with no trouble at all.

Almost.

Merely feet from the ground, the branch she was standing on cracked in half. She tumbled through the pine needles and painfully landed on the ground with a groan.

Kíli’s low voice drifted down to her. “…told you to mind where you placed your feet.”

Wincing at the sharp throb in her lower back, she mumbled, “Yeah, I’m fine, Kíli. I appreciate your concern. It’s touching, really.”

On her way back to camp, she plucked the dark blue elderberries she’d seen. When she slumped down against a fallen log next to Bilbo, Fíli took one long look at her disheveled appearance and said, “What were you two doin’?”

The nearby dwarves looked at her as well. With a snort, Glóin elbowed Dwalin, who was regarding her with stern disapproval.

Oblivious, Ara announced tiredly (but no less triumphantly), “I climbed a tree!”

“Oh,” said Fíli. He squinted at her hair. “Not well, I presume?”

Ara shook her head and a shower of twigs and pine needles rained down.

“She did alright,” Kíli said, emerging from the forest with three squirrels in his right hand. “She had an extraordinary teacher, if I do say so myself.”

“You’re not that good, brother.”

“Better’n you. Beat you when I was five, didn’t I?”

“I beat you once after that.”

“My leg was broken!”

“Still counts!”

Kíli handed the squirrels over to Bofur as he argued with his brother about the rules of tree-climbing. In moments like these, when she overheard their easy banter, Ara imagined they were more twins than anything else.

“Ara,” said Bofur from over the cooking-pot. “I know your sort likes tree bark and grass and the like, but when the stew’s finished, would you like some?”

Though it pleased her immensely that he’d thought to offer, she saw him skinning the squirrels with a filleting knife and grimaced.

“No, thank you,” she replied. “I think I’ll keep to tree bark and grass. Bombur can have my portion, if that’s alright.”

“Aye, it’s all right!” Bombur said immediately, his pink cheeks lifted in a smile. He rested his hands on his great big belly as if he was already anticipating the double meal.

When the stew was prepared, the company sat gathered around the fire. After helping Bofur pass out wooden bowls of stew to each of the dwarves, she plopped down between Bilbo and Kíli. As she popped berries into her mouth one by one, she noticed Bifur sitting between Glóin and Dori, silently drinking his stew. She realized then that she’d never before heard him speak.

Brow furrowed, she elbowed Kíli’s side. She hadn’t noticed he’d been in the middle of swallowing when she did it, so she was startled when he nearly choked on his stew.

Coughing, he sputtered, “Bit violent today, aren’t you?”

“Why doesn’t Bifur ever speak?” she asked quietly.

“He was in an accident,” he explained, wiping his chin with his dark blue sleeve. “He can only speak a bit of Khuzdul, but he mostly he uses Iglishmêk.”

Seeing her expression he added, “Khuzdul is our language and Iglsihmêk is our sign language.”

“Ah,” she said, understanding. “Do the rest of you not speak it? Is that why nobody ever tries to talk to him?”

“We do, lass. He just doesn’t speak much.”

Maybe, she thought. Or maybe you don’t try often enough.

She thought of Rivendell, of how she’d always sat in silence and how isolated she felt at times.

“How do you say ‘hello’ in Iglishmêk?” she suddenly asked.

Fíli snorted. “Kíli’s not the one to ask. Only Iglishmêk he knows is what he’s made up himself.”

Kíli shrugged, not disputing his brother at all. “My way’s easier,” he said simply.

“I can teach you, lass,” offered Balin. “If you really want to learn.”

Waiting until Kíli wasn’t paying attention, she dropped her remaining elderberries in his stew. With empty hands, she turned eagerly back to Balin.

He taught her that her palm had to be facing the person she was signing to, with her thumb and pointer finger bent inward. It was difficult for her to get her fingers to bend the right way, they were stiff, and either pointed too far down or too far up. She sat cross-legged in the grass, practicing the sign over and over again, not noticing that all the dwarves were watching her closely, Thorin especially. When she had it as best as she would get it, she walked over to Bifur. Standing before him with a smile, she signed ‘hello’ as best she could.

She gathered from his horrified expression and the eruption of laughter at her back that she’d done something terribly wrong.

“No, Ara,” Glóin said through his laughter, “Like this.”

Honestly, she couldn’t tell the difference between what he was showing her and what she’d just done, but she tried again. This time Bifur smiled kindly, moving his hands in a response too quickly for her to comprehend. At her flabbergasted expression, he scooted over and patted the empty space he’d made for her.

That she understood.

She sat next to him, and, with translations from the rest of the dwarves she spoke to him and learned a few more signs in Iglishmêk.

After the conversation died down and the crackling fire was the only sound remaining in the clearing, Ara said, “Do any of you know stories? I heard once that stories are often told around campfires.”

The dwarves were nearly asleep. Óin, who had the first shift on watch said, “I don’t know any stories, but will a song suffice?”

Nodding, she sat up straighter, and in a deep, melodic voice he began to sing:

Far over the Misty Mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.

The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches blazed with light.

The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

By the end of the song, the rest of the dwarves had joined in, their voices melding in a low, baritone hum that both comforted and saddened Ara. It was a song of their plight, of their loss, and it was beautiful in a melancholy, morbid way. When the song was finished, they stared into the fire, their eyes distant. She sat silently as the rumble of their voices drifted up and faded into the night.

She gazed at the Misty Mountains. There was a half-moon in the sky, tinting everything with an eerie, midnight blue. From where she sat she could see the silhouettes of the mountains, fog slowly swirling about their summits. She wondered how long the dwarves had thought to cross the mountains to return to Erebor.

They were wanderers like her, these dwarves, though their wandering was born out of necessity.

“How about you, Ara,” Kíli asked, breaking the solemn silence. “have you any stories to tell?”

“I’m afraid not,” she answered. “I only know tales of elven history, and I think you’d find them dreadfully dull.”

“Could you tell us anyway?” Ori asked, pulling out his notebook.

“Aye, might help us fall asleep,” Glóin said with a wink.

She sighed, and because Ori was looking at her with hopeful interest, she told them the story of how the elves came to be.

“The first elves awoke in the First Age, before even the sun and the moon. There were five pairs, a man and a woman in each pair, who were commanded to extend their own lineages. There were the noldor, the high elves, the wood elves, and…” she paused.

“I don’t remember the names of the last two,” she said regrettably. “Their original names are spoken in Primitive Quendian. It’s an ancient tongue, and they didn’t live long enough to have their names translated into a more common dialect.”

This was the first and only time Ara wished she’d attended more of her lessons. How foolish she must’ve seemed, not knowing her own history.

“Why didn’t they live long enough?” asked Ori.

“The War of Wrath. You see, the noldor, high elves, and wood elves were very subdued, tranquil creatures, but the others…they were volatile, violent beings who were easily spurred to anger. It is said that when angry, they were incapable of distinguishing friend from foe and killed without restraint. They would become so consumed by their rage that they became monsters. They turned on each other and the other elf orders, slaying and stealing. The noldor and the high and wood elves banded together and fought back until they were the only races remaining.”

“The elves fought…each other?” Bofur asked.

Thorin’s response came faster than hers. She’d thought he’d been sleeping. “Does that surprise you? The elves are notoriously disloyal. You know this.”

He didn’t say it as an insult, more as an indisputable fact.

And really, what could Ara say to refute him? Thranduil had betrayed the dwarves, her kin had out-casted her, and even she had broken her oath to Elrond the very day she’d made it.

Maybe Thorin was right for hating her so.

“Is there more to the story?” Fíli asked.

“No,” she answered quietly, her knees drawn into her chest. “The noldor, high, and wood elves slaughtered the other two races so they could live in peace. That’s how the story ends. Goodnight.”

When the dwarves clustered together as they always did to sleep, Ara moved to the opposite side of the fire, the furthest she’d ever slept from them. Like always, Kíli gestured for her to come closer, but without a word, she turned her back to him and pretended she hadn’t seen.

Shuffling through her bag, she sighed. Turned out, she should’ve packed a blanket. What she did pack was three trousers, one left boot, a shirt, and the bloody hairbrush. Sighing, she rested her head on the satchel and closed her eyes. If she’d kept them open a moment longer, she would’ve seen Bilbo place his bag next to hers, though a bit nearer to the campfire.

They slept side-by-side, Ara and Bilbo, while, on the other side of the fire, the dwarves slept huddled together like the family they were.