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Girion of Dale and the Water of the Enchanted River
"Daddy, Daddy! Look what we made!"
A chorus of little voices shouting and clamouring for their parents' attention provided little warning for the gathered dignitaries, before the door of the dining hall suddenly crashed open, admitting five little Elvish children.
"Daddy!" shouted the tallest and the shortest children, a boy and a girl with unusual curly brown hair, ran straight to the king's bodyguard, who sat at Thranduil's left hand.
The fastest child poked her blonde head up from her mother's arms, drawing the Queen's bodyguard's attention away from the Queen while she attended to her excited child.
Another blonde child, this one a boy, ran first to the King, before climbing up on the Queen's lap, excitedly babbling in Elvish, while his parents smiled benevolently down at him.
The last child, the only one not clamouring for a parent's attention, proudly carried a huge crock very carefully in his little arms. The Men cooed over the little children, exclaiming how adorable they all were, and soon the King introduced the children to the visiting Men of Dale.
"Lord Girion, may I introduce my son and his friends," Thranduil said in clear Westron, a little slower than usual so that the children might understand the words. "This is Legolas, my son. Sílívren's daughter is Aldanna. Lothellon's children are Brethilríl and Brethildíl, and the child with the crock is Tathar, Lothellon's sister-son. I thought," he said, turning his attention to Tathar now, "that you were all supposed to be under your mother's supervision?"
Tathar turned bright pink as the King's eyes turned on him. He squirmed uncomfortably, but answered in broken Westron, "Mummy had to help in the gardens, so Brevvils' Mummy let us play in the kitchen. We made dinner, look!"
The child brightened, and the four other children enthusiastically told the gathering all about how they made dinner, making a clear effort to speak in Westron out of respect for the Men present. Girion wasn't entirely sure that anyone could understand the children though, for they clearly were not very good at speaking the Mannish language, and kept stopping to think about what words to use, so that five versions were all being told at the same time.
Tathar approached the table, and squeezed in between his uncle and the King, to place the crock on the table. Girion, who sat opposite to the Elvenking, was closest of the Men to the crock, and he smelled it as the child placed the crock on the wood, sloshing it around a little as he did.
"It's yummy!" the children insisted, and so the group began passing the dish around, each Man and Elf filling a small bowl to the children's delight.
Just as Girion tasted the first spoonful, the doors opened, and the waiter who had been serving them earlier entered, leading a line of waiters who each carried an elegantly presented plate of a more conventional kind. He gasped, but managed not to overreact, instead placing the plate he carried in front of the King and whispering something in Elvish in his ear.
A brief expression of surprise flitted across Thranduil's face, before he lowered his eyes to look at the bowl now beside his plate.
Girion thanked the Elf who placed a similar plate in front of him, but kept watching the Elvenking as he glanced around the table, noting that every single Man and Elf attending the dinner had indeed taken a bowl of the children's 'dinner' with an expression of slight distress.
Once the waiters were cleared of the room, taking the children with them, Thranduil said mildly, "Don't feel obliged to eat the children's offering. The chef has informed me that it was unplanned, and he did not realise where the children had taken it when they left the kitchen."
Girion, wondering if that was the full story, asked a question he might have preferred to not know the answer of, for he had, actually, enjoyed the taste of the children's soup. "Do you not like it, then, your Majesty?"
Thranduil raised a single eyebrow, glanced at the crock, and then looked Girion in the eye as he answered. "The children decided to make up their own recipe, it seems. The chef is unsure of exactly what went into the dish, but he found a number of empty jars once the children left. While most are harmless, some of them were preparations for the healers."
With increasing worry, Girion asked the question burning in the minds of everyone present. "Which ones?"
"There might be a laxative, and there is likely at least one sleeping powder."
While the Men had horror dawning on them, imagining what lay ahead, the Queen chuckled, while both bodyguards started laughing outright.
"What is funny about laxatives and sleeping powder?" Girion's advisor asked, and Girion noticed that the three Elvish advisors all had their heads in their hands, clearly not liking the situation one bit.
"My sister," Lothellon began, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye, "was supposed to be minding the children this afternoon. She is the housekeeper, I think that is the word, on duty in this part of the palace. If the children have indeed mixed the healers' drugs into the soup, she will suffer the consequences!"
As it happened, the laxative and the two sleeping powders had only been spilled, and had not made their way into the soup. The water, however, that the children had used, was the water from which one of the sleeping powders was obtained, which came from an enchanted river which passed through the forest. The water from the Enchanted River had the unique properties of putting people to sleep, and also making them forget recent events. When the sleeping powder was separated from the water, the water was then kept so that the healers could separate a second powder from it: a powerful drug which caused forgetfulness.
The soup contained a rather large dose of the forgetfulness powder, and the single spoonful which most of the guests had consumed contained enough amnesia-water that they all forgot that evening entirely.
The next day, the Elvenking commented to Girion that Dorwinion Wine was rather strong, and so Girion, and his Men, thought no more of the evening they couldn't remember in the King's Halls.
The Healers, though, were none too pleased to discover that their latest batches of powders had been hijacked by young children, for they now had to send a second expedition out to the Enchanted River, and other parts of the forest to gather the raw materials to replace the powders.