Fic: An Inevitable Outcome
Dec. 29th, 2014 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grav_ityNote: I wasn't sure if I was ever going to get to this, but after the movie came out, I received several really lovely notes from people who need a happy ending. Which, let's be real: we need a happy ending. So I sat down to write the last chapter, only to discover that there will be FIVE chapters, not four.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
+++
Chapter 4
The baby cries, and there is naught that Sigrid can do to make her stop. She has been holding her sister for hours, it feels like, while their mother lies on the bed in an unhealthy sleep from which she will not wake. Bain is curled up in the window seat with an apple. He, at the least, is not crying, and Sigrid is glad of it. She wants her mother to wake, and the baby to be quiet and, more than anything, her father to come home and set everything to rights. But the sun is only just at the apex of the sky, and she knows it will be hours before he does.
She sings, and the baby does not quiet. She rocks her sister in her arms, and it does nothing. Finally, in desperation, she heats up the last of the goat’s milk that her father brought home as a treat for her and Bain, but she is too short to reach the hob, and one handed she cannot manage the pot. She spills most of it, and burns her hand, which she cannot bind. She does not cry, even though it hurts beyond anything she has ever felt before. She has had enough of tears.
Bain crawls into bed with their mother, and falls asleep. Sigrid paces the floor, the screaming baby getting heavier by the moment. Her arms ache and her burned hand aches, and she is so tired. She wants to lie down beside her brother, but she knows that she cannot stop. She cannot give up.
At last the sun is low. Bain rouses himself to poke at the fire. At nearly four years, he can manage the poker well enough, but the embers are past the point of flaring back to life. Sigrid had forgotten to pay attention to them, so focused on her sister all day. She is staring at the woodpile, trying to remember how their father laid the logs that morning, when Bard comes in.
The other men in Esgaroth refer to her father as grim faced, but Sigrid has only ever known him as smiling and easy. She sees it now, though: his eyes are dark, and his mouth is set in a tight line. That scares her more than anything else that has happened today, and her eyes fill against her own determination otherwise.
“Oh, my darlings,” he says, crossing to where they are huddled by the fire and taking all three of them into his arms. “Give me the poker.”
He builds the fire anew, and hands Sigrid and Bain a strip each of the dried fish he takes with him when he is out on the barge. He kisses the baby’s head, and then turns to where his wife lies, still burning up under the light sheets Sigrid covered her with.
“Sigrid,” he says. “I am going to fetch the midwife. I will not be gone long. Stay close to the fire with your brother and sister.”
The baby is still screaming, but Bain is content to chew and wait. Sigrid puts the fish in her sister’s mouth and the baby sucks on it for a few blessed moments of quiet before spitting it out and beginning again. Soon enough, though, Bard returns with the midwife, who immediately takes the baby from Sigrid and turns to see what she can do for the ailing mother.
“Flocks and fleets, my ducks, has she been like this all day?” The midwife’s false cheer sets Sigrid’s teeth on edge, and she’s not sure if it’s her sister or her mother the midwife speaks of.
“Yes,” Bain replies before Sigrid can. “Mama has been so hot and the baby would not mind Sigrid even though Sigrid held her and rocked and sang.”
“I couldn’t feed her, though,” Sigrid admits. “I tried, but she was heavy and I burned myself on the pan.”
The midwife exchanges a look with Bard that Sigrid does not understand, and then her father comes to her and looks at her hand.
“My brave girl,” he says, taking one of his clean handkerchiefs to wrap around the burn. “You have done so much today. I could not ask for better.”
“But-” Sigrid starts, trying to tell him that she has done nothing. The baby has not eaten. Bain has not eaten. And her mother has not risen, not once all day. Bard brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it, half courtly and half to make it better. The grimness is gone from his visage for a moment, and she feels her own smile creep across her face.
“Come, sit with Bain and mind the fire for me,” he says. “You have earned a rest.”
He wraps a blanket around them, and they fall asleep on the floor. When they wake, it is to learn that their mother has passed further into her fevered sleep, and is not expected to rise from it. The midwife has found another woman to feed the baby until Bard can secure his own goat, so it is quiet, save for the crackling of the fire. Sigrid would be willing to hear the cacophony again, if only it meant her mother was awake.
Later, when the men have come to take her mother away to be wrapped up and put in a boat for burning, Sigrid tries to remember the last thing her mother said. It wasn’t spoken to her, Sigrid knows this much, nor to her father. Rather, it was whispered to the baby instead, the baby that Sigrid now holds.
“Tilda,” she says, and cries at last, for it is as much a beginning as it is an end.
+++
By the time Sigrid is showing, the elves have long-since departed from the Mountain, and Tilda has learned to fletch an arrow that will not buzz like an angry bee when fired. Her nausea has not yet faded, though it seems that fewer foods and smells trigger her. She has, however, remained dependent upon cram in the mornings, and is developing an entirely dwarvish distaste for it that Fili finds endlessly amusing.
She no longer spends her mornings in the stillrooms, for those smells still set her off, and she misses the steady work there. She goes to the kitchens instead, which are marginally safer in that there is not shortage of empty pails and pots should she require them, but her tasks there are less complicated and she finds that she tires of them quickly, as they must nearly all be done standing up.
To keep from feeling completely overmatched, she throws herself into sewing. She had not done the traditional bride work before coming to the mountain because they had linens aplenty already and she was not outfitting a house, but there are endless blankets and napkins to prepare, as well as her own dresses to modify for her rapidly expanding figure. So she sits with her dwarrowdam ladies and with her sister, and they stitch and share secrets in a way that Sigrid had only dreamed of before.
“You will find,” Gloin’s wife says, “that all males are terrified of badgers.”
“They have faced orcs and worse on the battlefield,” Tilda protests. “My father slayed a dragon! Why would they fear a baby?”
The few mothers in the group laugh, the hearty laugh of dwarves and Sigrid first found so shocking but has come to love.
“You will see,” says Dis, who has joined them this afternoon. Often she is too busy with the guilds. “Even my brother quailed when I tried to pass Fili to him the first time.”
Tilda, ever mindful for such openings, immediately requests stories of Fili and Kili when they were badgers, and Dis is quite happy to tell them the most shameful secrets of her sons. Tauriel, who does not sew much beyond her own mending but attends because she enjoys Sigrid’s company, cannot look at either of the princes over dinner for a week, which makes the entire thing even better.
The piles of garments grow around them, not all for Sigrid. There are two other dwarrowdams who will bear children after Sigrid does, and three weddings to sew for. Dis has also set aside some time to expand Tilda’s collection of linen, a gift for which both sisters are quite grateful. When they grow tired of hemming sheets, they teach Tauriel to embroider, which is a source of great amusement for all witnesses and somehow a tale that is never repeated outside the sewing room, no matter how hard Kili begs to hear it.
“It’s lovely,” Tilda says one night when Fili is kept late with Thorin and Balin, and she and Sigrid have climbed into Tilda’s bed as they have not done since the night before Sigrid was married. Then her face grows solemn. “Do you think Mama would mind?”
Bain has few recollections of their mother, and Tilda nary a one. Sigrid has tried to tell them both about her, but sometimes she had wondered if that might only serve to make Tilda sad. Sigrid knows that the memory of her mother hurts enough, and is never sure if her sister’s lack of memory is good or ill.
“I think Mama would be happy to see us happy,” Sigrid tells her. “I miss her less and less, living here, until I think about her, and then I find I miss her even more.”
“Sometimes I wish I knew her,” Tilda says. “But I’ve always had you, and now I have Maude. I don’t need anything else.”
“I don’t either,” Sigrid says. “I don’t think either of us are quite used to having more than we need.”
“You’ll never be used to it,” Tilda says, closing her eyes. “You and Fili both. Da says that’s what makes you good.”
It makes them all good, Sigrid thinks, but doesn’t say. The challenge will be raising the babe to be the same way, without it ever having to wonder where the next meal is coming from or if the house would burn in the night because a dragon had decided to finally do something about the defenseless town in the middle of the Long Lake.
They will build that bridge when they need to, she decides, crawling out from her sister’s bed and then tucking in the coverlet as she might have done years ago when the blanket was only half as thick. When she gets back to their rooms, Fili is waiting for her, and she goes into his arms with a smile. She does not need this either, but she is forever glad to have it.
+++
Even with five years to rebuild, Sigrid’s dowry is not what it should be. She will go into the Mountain to marry its prince with a small wardrobe and no fine linens. The dwarves do not mind. Their marriage traditions are different enough that they did not expect Sigrid to bring a dowry at all, but the people of Dale know, and feel the shortcoming rather personally.
They arrive in small boxes and wooden chests. No one has heirlooms anymore, or at least not many, but five years is enough time for a merchant to turn profit; enough time for a craftsman to make trinkets to sell. There are ribbons and pins, a set of drinking cups rumoured to come from the Shire itself, and cuttings from nearly every sort of flower grown in Dale.
“Where did it come from?” Fili asks as he helps Sigrid pack the ponies that will carry her belongings to the Mountain.
“From Dale,” is all that Sigrid can tell him, because that is as much as she knows.
“None of it is dwarf-make,” Fili says, as much to himself as to her. “I mean, none of it is what dwarves craft.”
“Of course,” she tells him. “They are as much for you as they are for me. That’s why I asked you to help me pack it all up.”
“I am devastated, my lady,” he says to her with a hand over his heart like she has stuck him with a spear. “I had thought that you pined away without me.”
She laughs, drawing the eyes of her father and of Master Dwalin, who came to escort Fili. They are still so formal with one another, despite their attempts otherwise, that she feels laughing with him is a step in the right direction.
“Alas, my lord,” she replies in much haughtier tone than she has ever used. “I have been so busy that I barely noticed your absence at all.”
Fili roars with laughter at this, and she sees the dwarf musician that Tilda talks about sometimes when she tells stories that Kili has told her about when they were badgers in Ered Luin. He has relaxed into his role as prince, as she has to her place as a lady in Dale, and she can only hope that it will not take them five years to become accustomed to being wed to one another. Dwarves and elves might have that kind of time, but Sigrid would prefer to be settled long before that.
“Come on, Dwalin,” calls Fili when the last pony is laden. “We must away to Erebor before my lady comes to know me well enough that she can no longer bear to be parted from me.”
“Somehow I doubt that’s how it would work out,” Dwalin growls, but he winks when he says it, belying his tone. Behind him, Bard looks solemn again, but Sigrid is pleased to note that the grim-faced father she knew did not dive from Esgaroth after slaying the dragon.
“I am beset from all sides,” Fili declares, and takes her hand to kiss it. Then he swings up on an unladen pony and, with his guard beside him, heads up the trail for the Gate that will soon be the entrance to their home.
Sigrid watches him until he disappears, and is surprised to learn that she does, in fact, miss him.
+++
In addition to her sewing preparations, Sigrid has begun to sit in on more court sessions. She had heard her father’s petitioners while she still lived in Dale, but has not spent much time at such tasks in Erebor. Still, there is a chair for her beside Fili’s on the dais, and if her attention drifts when a dwarf-lord is quibbling over a contract with Balin, she merely has to rest a hand on her growing belly and no one complains.
This day, however, there is something that holds her gaze. A rather large hound stands with the petitioners, apparently more content to wait for its turn than many of the dwarves who come to the hall. Nearly the size of a dwarf pony, the hound carries saddlebags like a pony might, though they are made of woven grasses and not leather as the dwarf ones would be.
When the hound’s turn comes, it makes a rather elegant bow to Thorin before turning and coming to stand in front of Sigrid and Fili. At five months, it takes a rather significant amount of effort for Sigrid to rise from her chair, so when Fili squeezes her hand and stands, she waits for him to pull her up with some amount of dignity. The hound whuffs at her knees, and then moves so that she can reach into one of the baskets it carries. Its tail wags as Fili takes the opportunity to scratch behind its ears.
There is a scroll, which she passes to Balin, and several tightly wrapped bundles underneath. The smell wafting out of the basket is delightful, and she sees Fili smile.
“To the Lady of the Mountain, from the Skin-Changer Beorn,” Balin reads, entering the letter into the dwarven records because the hound cannot speak to do it itself. “A raven bound for Rivendell took its rest here some weeks ago, and I understood from its speech that you were still unwell at times.”
Balin reads all of this in his booming voice, echoes bouncing off the high stone roof. Sigrid might have blushed, once upon a time, to hear her health discussed so publicly, but five years with dwarves have changed her conceptions of privacy.
“The hound bears honey-cakes of my own make,” Balin continues, “which I can, at least, assure you will suit better than cram.”
There is laughter at that.
“The hound may stay if he wishes,” Balin concludes, “but he is a free creature, and if he does not remain with you, please permit him to go where ever he would.”
“Thank you, hound,” Thorin says, with only the barest hint of a smile as he addresses the dog as formally as he addresses his kin. “You are most welcome here in Erebor.”
The hound bows again as Fili lifts the baskets from its sides, and then turns to sit at Sigrid’s feet for the remainder of the session. After, it follows them back to their quarters and lies on the rug before the fire, while Tilda, who came with them, sits down beside it.
“Beorn didn’t say what his name is,” Tilda points out.
“None of the creatures Beorn keeps had names, so far as I know,” Fili says. “There were a great many of them. Perhaps they have names in their own tongues, and Beorn didn’t think we could say it properly.”
“Maybe it has a secret name, like a dwarf,” Sigrid adds, smiling. Secret names plague her sister’s existence because she neither has nor knows one.
“Do you have a name, hound?” Tilda asks. “I will say it a hundred times until I say it properly.”
The hound licks her face from chin to hairline, and Tilda falls over its long body, giggling. When she has recovered herself, she sits between its paws looking thoughtful.
“He has such curly toes,” Tilda says. “Perhaps we ought to name him Bilbo.”
Fili protests that she ought not name a hound, even a hound like this one, after a Hobbit, but for all his efforts, the hound will respond to nothing else. Bilbo-the-hound sits at Sigrid’s feet every day in court, and lies well out of the way when she meets with her ladies to sew. He sleeps on the rug by the fire at night, and performs daily inspections of the room that will serve as the nursery.
When Sigrid’s pains begin at last, it the hounds barking that first raises the alarm.
+++
Chapter 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
+++
Chapter 4
The baby cries, and there is naught that Sigrid can do to make her stop. She has been holding her sister for hours, it feels like, while their mother lies on the bed in an unhealthy sleep from which she will not wake. Bain is curled up in the window seat with an apple. He, at the least, is not crying, and Sigrid is glad of it. She wants her mother to wake, and the baby to be quiet and, more than anything, her father to come home and set everything to rights. But the sun is only just at the apex of the sky, and she knows it will be hours before he does.
She sings, and the baby does not quiet. She rocks her sister in her arms, and it does nothing. Finally, in desperation, she heats up the last of the goat’s milk that her father brought home as a treat for her and Bain, but she is too short to reach the hob, and one handed she cannot manage the pot. She spills most of it, and burns her hand, which she cannot bind. She does not cry, even though it hurts beyond anything she has ever felt before. She has had enough of tears.
Bain crawls into bed with their mother, and falls asleep. Sigrid paces the floor, the screaming baby getting heavier by the moment. Her arms ache and her burned hand aches, and she is so tired. She wants to lie down beside her brother, but she knows that she cannot stop. She cannot give up.
At last the sun is low. Bain rouses himself to poke at the fire. At nearly four years, he can manage the poker well enough, but the embers are past the point of flaring back to life. Sigrid had forgotten to pay attention to them, so focused on her sister all day. She is staring at the woodpile, trying to remember how their father laid the logs that morning, when Bard comes in.
The other men in Esgaroth refer to her father as grim faced, but Sigrid has only ever known him as smiling and easy. She sees it now, though: his eyes are dark, and his mouth is set in a tight line. That scares her more than anything else that has happened today, and her eyes fill against her own determination otherwise.
“Oh, my darlings,” he says, crossing to where they are huddled by the fire and taking all three of them into his arms. “Give me the poker.”
He builds the fire anew, and hands Sigrid and Bain a strip each of the dried fish he takes with him when he is out on the barge. He kisses the baby’s head, and then turns to where his wife lies, still burning up under the light sheets Sigrid covered her with.
“Sigrid,” he says. “I am going to fetch the midwife. I will not be gone long. Stay close to the fire with your brother and sister.”
The baby is still screaming, but Bain is content to chew and wait. Sigrid puts the fish in her sister’s mouth and the baby sucks on it for a few blessed moments of quiet before spitting it out and beginning again. Soon enough, though, Bard returns with the midwife, who immediately takes the baby from Sigrid and turns to see what she can do for the ailing mother.
“Flocks and fleets, my ducks, has she been like this all day?” The midwife’s false cheer sets Sigrid’s teeth on edge, and she’s not sure if it’s her sister or her mother the midwife speaks of.
“Yes,” Bain replies before Sigrid can. “Mama has been so hot and the baby would not mind Sigrid even though Sigrid held her and rocked and sang.”
“I couldn’t feed her, though,” Sigrid admits. “I tried, but she was heavy and I burned myself on the pan.”
The midwife exchanges a look with Bard that Sigrid does not understand, and then her father comes to her and looks at her hand.
“My brave girl,” he says, taking one of his clean handkerchiefs to wrap around the burn. “You have done so much today. I could not ask for better.”
“But-” Sigrid starts, trying to tell him that she has done nothing. The baby has not eaten. Bain has not eaten. And her mother has not risen, not once all day. Bard brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it, half courtly and half to make it better. The grimness is gone from his visage for a moment, and she feels her own smile creep across her face.
“Come, sit with Bain and mind the fire for me,” he says. “You have earned a rest.”
He wraps a blanket around them, and they fall asleep on the floor. When they wake, it is to learn that their mother has passed further into her fevered sleep, and is not expected to rise from it. The midwife has found another woman to feed the baby until Bard can secure his own goat, so it is quiet, save for the crackling of the fire. Sigrid would be willing to hear the cacophony again, if only it meant her mother was awake.
Later, when the men have come to take her mother away to be wrapped up and put in a boat for burning, Sigrid tries to remember the last thing her mother said. It wasn’t spoken to her, Sigrid knows this much, nor to her father. Rather, it was whispered to the baby instead, the baby that Sigrid now holds.
“Tilda,” she says, and cries at last, for it is as much a beginning as it is an end.
+++
By the time Sigrid is showing, the elves have long-since departed from the Mountain, and Tilda has learned to fletch an arrow that will not buzz like an angry bee when fired. Her nausea has not yet faded, though it seems that fewer foods and smells trigger her. She has, however, remained dependent upon cram in the mornings, and is developing an entirely dwarvish distaste for it that Fili finds endlessly amusing.
She no longer spends her mornings in the stillrooms, for those smells still set her off, and she misses the steady work there. She goes to the kitchens instead, which are marginally safer in that there is not shortage of empty pails and pots should she require them, but her tasks there are less complicated and she finds that she tires of them quickly, as they must nearly all be done standing up.
To keep from feeling completely overmatched, she throws herself into sewing. She had not done the traditional bride work before coming to the mountain because they had linens aplenty already and she was not outfitting a house, but there are endless blankets and napkins to prepare, as well as her own dresses to modify for her rapidly expanding figure. So she sits with her dwarrowdam ladies and with her sister, and they stitch and share secrets in a way that Sigrid had only dreamed of before.
“You will find,” Gloin’s wife says, “that all males are terrified of badgers.”
“They have faced orcs and worse on the battlefield,” Tilda protests. “My father slayed a dragon! Why would they fear a baby?”
The few mothers in the group laugh, the hearty laugh of dwarves and Sigrid first found so shocking but has come to love.
“You will see,” says Dis, who has joined them this afternoon. Often she is too busy with the guilds. “Even my brother quailed when I tried to pass Fili to him the first time.”
Tilda, ever mindful for such openings, immediately requests stories of Fili and Kili when they were badgers, and Dis is quite happy to tell them the most shameful secrets of her sons. Tauriel, who does not sew much beyond her own mending but attends because she enjoys Sigrid’s company, cannot look at either of the princes over dinner for a week, which makes the entire thing even better.
The piles of garments grow around them, not all for Sigrid. There are two other dwarrowdams who will bear children after Sigrid does, and three weddings to sew for. Dis has also set aside some time to expand Tilda’s collection of linen, a gift for which both sisters are quite grateful. When they grow tired of hemming sheets, they teach Tauriel to embroider, which is a source of great amusement for all witnesses and somehow a tale that is never repeated outside the sewing room, no matter how hard Kili begs to hear it.
“It’s lovely,” Tilda says one night when Fili is kept late with Thorin and Balin, and she and Sigrid have climbed into Tilda’s bed as they have not done since the night before Sigrid was married. Then her face grows solemn. “Do you think Mama would mind?”
Bain has few recollections of their mother, and Tilda nary a one. Sigrid has tried to tell them both about her, but sometimes she had wondered if that might only serve to make Tilda sad. Sigrid knows that the memory of her mother hurts enough, and is never sure if her sister’s lack of memory is good or ill.
“I think Mama would be happy to see us happy,” Sigrid tells her. “I miss her less and less, living here, until I think about her, and then I find I miss her even more.”
“Sometimes I wish I knew her,” Tilda says. “But I’ve always had you, and now I have Maude. I don’t need anything else.”
“I don’t either,” Sigrid says. “I don’t think either of us are quite used to having more than we need.”
“You’ll never be used to it,” Tilda says, closing her eyes. “You and Fili both. Da says that’s what makes you good.”
It makes them all good, Sigrid thinks, but doesn’t say. The challenge will be raising the babe to be the same way, without it ever having to wonder where the next meal is coming from or if the house would burn in the night because a dragon had decided to finally do something about the defenseless town in the middle of the Long Lake.
They will build that bridge when they need to, she decides, crawling out from her sister’s bed and then tucking in the coverlet as she might have done years ago when the blanket was only half as thick. When she gets back to their rooms, Fili is waiting for her, and she goes into his arms with a smile. She does not need this either, but she is forever glad to have it.
+++
Even with five years to rebuild, Sigrid’s dowry is not what it should be. She will go into the Mountain to marry its prince with a small wardrobe and no fine linens. The dwarves do not mind. Their marriage traditions are different enough that they did not expect Sigrid to bring a dowry at all, but the people of Dale know, and feel the shortcoming rather personally.
They arrive in small boxes and wooden chests. No one has heirlooms anymore, or at least not many, but five years is enough time for a merchant to turn profit; enough time for a craftsman to make trinkets to sell. There are ribbons and pins, a set of drinking cups rumoured to come from the Shire itself, and cuttings from nearly every sort of flower grown in Dale.
“Where did it come from?” Fili asks as he helps Sigrid pack the ponies that will carry her belongings to the Mountain.
“From Dale,” is all that Sigrid can tell him, because that is as much as she knows.
“None of it is dwarf-make,” Fili says, as much to himself as to her. “I mean, none of it is what dwarves craft.”
“Of course,” she tells him. “They are as much for you as they are for me. That’s why I asked you to help me pack it all up.”
“I am devastated, my lady,” he says to her with a hand over his heart like she has stuck him with a spear. “I had thought that you pined away without me.”
She laughs, drawing the eyes of her father and of Master Dwalin, who came to escort Fili. They are still so formal with one another, despite their attempts otherwise, that she feels laughing with him is a step in the right direction.
“Alas, my lord,” she replies in much haughtier tone than she has ever used. “I have been so busy that I barely noticed your absence at all.”
Fili roars with laughter at this, and she sees the dwarf musician that Tilda talks about sometimes when she tells stories that Kili has told her about when they were badgers in Ered Luin. He has relaxed into his role as prince, as she has to her place as a lady in Dale, and she can only hope that it will not take them five years to become accustomed to being wed to one another. Dwarves and elves might have that kind of time, but Sigrid would prefer to be settled long before that.
“Come on, Dwalin,” calls Fili when the last pony is laden. “We must away to Erebor before my lady comes to know me well enough that she can no longer bear to be parted from me.”
“Somehow I doubt that’s how it would work out,” Dwalin growls, but he winks when he says it, belying his tone. Behind him, Bard looks solemn again, but Sigrid is pleased to note that the grim-faced father she knew did not dive from Esgaroth after slaying the dragon.
“I am beset from all sides,” Fili declares, and takes her hand to kiss it. Then he swings up on an unladen pony and, with his guard beside him, heads up the trail for the Gate that will soon be the entrance to their home.
Sigrid watches him until he disappears, and is surprised to learn that she does, in fact, miss him.
+++
In addition to her sewing preparations, Sigrid has begun to sit in on more court sessions. She had heard her father’s petitioners while she still lived in Dale, but has not spent much time at such tasks in Erebor. Still, there is a chair for her beside Fili’s on the dais, and if her attention drifts when a dwarf-lord is quibbling over a contract with Balin, she merely has to rest a hand on her growing belly and no one complains.
This day, however, there is something that holds her gaze. A rather large hound stands with the petitioners, apparently more content to wait for its turn than many of the dwarves who come to the hall. Nearly the size of a dwarf pony, the hound carries saddlebags like a pony might, though they are made of woven grasses and not leather as the dwarf ones would be.
When the hound’s turn comes, it makes a rather elegant bow to Thorin before turning and coming to stand in front of Sigrid and Fili. At five months, it takes a rather significant amount of effort for Sigrid to rise from her chair, so when Fili squeezes her hand and stands, she waits for him to pull her up with some amount of dignity. The hound whuffs at her knees, and then moves so that she can reach into one of the baskets it carries. Its tail wags as Fili takes the opportunity to scratch behind its ears.
There is a scroll, which she passes to Balin, and several tightly wrapped bundles underneath. The smell wafting out of the basket is delightful, and she sees Fili smile.
“To the Lady of the Mountain, from the Skin-Changer Beorn,” Balin reads, entering the letter into the dwarven records because the hound cannot speak to do it itself. “A raven bound for Rivendell took its rest here some weeks ago, and I understood from its speech that you were still unwell at times.”
Balin reads all of this in his booming voice, echoes bouncing off the high stone roof. Sigrid might have blushed, once upon a time, to hear her health discussed so publicly, but five years with dwarves have changed her conceptions of privacy.
“The hound bears honey-cakes of my own make,” Balin continues, “which I can, at least, assure you will suit better than cram.”
There is laughter at that.
“The hound may stay if he wishes,” Balin concludes, “but he is a free creature, and if he does not remain with you, please permit him to go where ever he would.”
“Thank you, hound,” Thorin says, with only the barest hint of a smile as he addresses the dog as formally as he addresses his kin. “You are most welcome here in Erebor.”
The hound bows again as Fili lifts the baskets from its sides, and then turns to sit at Sigrid’s feet for the remainder of the session. After, it follows them back to their quarters and lies on the rug before the fire, while Tilda, who came with them, sits down beside it.
“Beorn didn’t say what his name is,” Tilda points out.
“None of the creatures Beorn keeps had names, so far as I know,” Fili says. “There were a great many of them. Perhaps they have names in their own tongues, and Beorn didn’t think we could say it properly.”
“Maybe it has a secret name, like a dwarf,” Sigrid adds, smiling. Secret names plague her sister’s existence because she neither has nor knows one.
“Do you have a name, hound?” Tilda asks. “I will say it a hundred times until I say it properly.”
The hound licks her face from chin to hairline, and Tilda falls over its long body, giggling. When she has recovered herself, she sits between its paws looking thoughtful.
“He has such curly toes,” Tilda says. “Perhaps we ought to name him Bilbo.”
Fili protests that she ought not name a hound, even a hound like this one, after a Hobbit, but for all his efforts, the hound will respond to nothing else. Bilbo-the-hound sits at Sigrid’s feet every day in court, and lies well out of the way when she meets with her ladies to sew. He sleeps on the rug by the fire at night, and performs daily inspections of the room that will serve as the nursery.
When Sigrid’s pains begin at last, it the hounds barking that first raises the alarm.
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Chapter 5
