She knew about him long before he knew about her. Everyone knew about him.

Bard, the shag-headed lad without so much as a surname, was known to all the children of Laketown just as his father, the drunkard Rancid Borin, was known to their parents. It was a fact in the town that no matter how poor or lonely or unloved a lad might be, no lad could be poorer or lonelier or less loved than Bard.

Perhaps that was what drew her to him.

Or perhaps it was the stories he told.


By the time he was ten, no one could recall whether Bard had been the name given him by his mother at birth, or the name settled on by unspoken agreement of the townspeople. But Bard he was, and Bard he would stay. To most people the name was a joke, a mockery of the ragged little nobody who thought himself a king's own troubadour. He would scurry around town doing his father's bidding, making small deliveries, transferring cargo from the leaky old barge Sindra to the rickety length of dock they paid rent on each month. And while he scurried, he sang under his breath. He never sang the bawdy, rousing folk songs treasured by all in his caste, and he didn't know the grand lays that were dusted off for high feast days. Instead, he embellished the old tales that everyone knew from the cradle, put a tune to each one, and rhymed them as best he could.

"What you muttering?" the dockworkers would grunt at him while he stacked a load of barrels from the Elf-King. "Those ain't real songs, nohow. Let's have 'Sally's Skirt I' The Current'! That there's a proper workin' song!"

Or, "You keep on about Dragons and you'll have your own arse crisped, and no one but yourself and my old willow switch to blame! Heave off, lad, and mind the pilings!"

Whereupon Bard would sing under his breath until his jeering detractors were out of hearing.

"Ye've heard of Smaug the Dragon," he said thoughtfully to the prow of his father's barge while he rowed it slowly to the shoreline where woodcutters had already laid in a large stack of kindling to be transferred to the town. "Aye, ye've heard of him, the great ugly Dragon Hisself; but what ye've not heard of is the Raven who drove him to skulk away in his hidey-hole till kingdom-come, all by means of a fair day's taunting." And he began to hum a simple little tune to the barge, and then, when he had worked out the words, to sing:

"No steed was he, the Dragon King

for man to ride on seated.

For Smaug was large and quick of wing

And couldna be defeated.

Whenever his great neck he'd swing,

Everyone nearby retreated.

.

The Raven was a little bird

but clever as a junkyard dog.

He croaked, 'You slow old grizzled lizard,

are you dragon or are you frog?"

Offensive were his cheeky words

to anyone, but especially Smaug.

.

Said Smaug, 'Impudent sooty chicklet!

Better get yer wings a-bouncin'!

I'll swallow you like a bitty biscuit!

I'll cook you in my flamey fountain!'

But Raven he didna scare a bit,

but said, 'I'll race ye to the mountain!

.

And if I reach the mountain first

Ye'll leave the town, and turn yer cheek.'

So Smaug he laughed a fiery burst

and flexed his shoulders and his beak.

But afore he'd a chance to do his worst,

Raven'd already claimed the peak!

.

Smaug was so shamed he hung his head

and crawled away to sulk in peace.

Thereafter he took to his bed

and ne'er again came out to feast.

The folk were free once Smaugy fled

and praised small Raven from west to east.

.

To nary a soul did our hero reveal

that he could never ha' hoped to show

if the race had been a lawful deal.

Though Raven'd left Smaug far below,

the bird who that day claimed the hill

was only clever Raven's shadow."

It wasn't very good, perhaps, but after all Bard was only very young, and had to concentrate on poling the heavy old barge as much as on meter and rhyme.


Bard came from a long line of shamed men, beginning with Girion Lord of Dale, who had fired arrow after arrow at Smaug during the evacuation of Dale, and missed his mark each time. In a town as isolated as Laketown hardly a soul could not claim kinship with Lord Girion, if they looked back far enough. But Bard descended from Girion in a straight line, through six generations of firstborn sons, and it was his misfortune to closely resemble the few remaining images of that old failure. Bard could always be relied upon to remind a whole roomful of drunkards that no matter how pathetic they were, at least they hadn't doomed a whole city of people to dank living on a cold lake.

Things had not always been so bad for Girion's line. The first few Masters of Laketown had been his sons and nephews, and once, his granddaughter. Even when the line passed out of prominence, they held businesses and owned some property, and were neither more nor less than any other citizen.

But the Master of Laketown who preceded the present one had made unwise investments with the townspeople's money, and hard times had come; and the people had begun to whisper that perhaps the early royalists were right, and that Girion's line should be restored. When certain documents arose proving that in fact their present financial woes were the fault of Borin, and not of the Master at all, all talk of restoring Girion's line was put to rest. Borin always claimed that the evidence had been falsified, but he could not prove it, and lost everything save his barge, the Sindra, with which he eked out the barest of livings. His first wife had wasted away, from shame some people said, and his second wife had lost five babies before finally producing Bard, and died before the afterbirth was cleaned from her wee son's face. Borin in his bitterness took to drink, and kept the Sindra moving just long enough for young Bard to take over it at the tender age of twelve.

The present Master of Laketown was a shrewd businessman, and the town did well under him; and if the distinction between classes became a little steeper than it had been before, and if the wealth that poured into the town stuck mostly to the top half, and never splashed down below—well, that was just economics. Work hard and prosper, he said in his election speeches, and those who prospered agreed, and nobody listened to those who didn't.

But the royalist whispers were never quite so dead that a little fanning mightn't give new life to the flames; and the new Master of Laketown was not so secure in his following that he could afford to pass up a joke about Girion's aim, and the absurdity of that whole disgraceful line.


When Bard was small, before his father's drinking drove away his last paternal instincts, Borin would regale his only son and heir with tales of Girion and Dale. Perhaps it would have been better for Bard if he had never gotten a taste for the grandeur of the past, but lorecraft was one of the few things he took from his father, for good or ill. The only people in the town who would listen to Bard without laughing at him were small children, those too young to have yet decided that Bard's singing was, at best, "putting on airs" and, at worst, a threat to the precarious financial security of the town. Nobody would have believed that he sang simply because he liked it.

At any rate little children did not stay little in that town for long, and too soon the boys who had so recently sat and listened wide-eyed to his songs were big enough to chase him around throwing oyster shells at his head; and the little girls who had laughed at Raven's exploits and shuddered at Smaug's avarice and sighed at Girion's nobility—well, those very girls were quick to turn away disdainfully if he but smiled at them.

There were some, fishwives and men with young sons of their own, mostly, who would have been kind to Bard if he had let them; but when he was small he didn't notice, and when he grew older he would not have believed it in any case.


Bard was an obedient son if not an enthusiastic one, and learned early to row and pole barrels of fish or wine or mead to and from the Landing where the Elves and the businessmen of Laketown conducted the chief part of their business. It was cold, boring, smelly work, and no one envied Bard of it, though not a soul voiced the opinion (if any indeed felt it in the first place) that he was too young to have the sole responsibility for a business which ought by rights to be run by his father. Nor did any pub in town decline to sell Borin his weight in ale. His sole entertainment on the barge was his own imagination, which soon became his only escape from ugly reality.

But Bard's experience of life in Laketown was not in any regard typical. Even the poor children got days off, and sweet-meats to eat on their birthdays. Further up the scale, children of respectable businessmen and -women could be sure of a bit of schooling, and a new pair of shoes every year. Children who wore silken coats and ringlets in their hair were by no means unheard-of, although Bard could not begin to envision their lives.

But no little child in that town could enjoy luckier circumstances than Grethe, the daughter of the Master's scribe. If Bard was the loneliest and most unloved child in town, Grethe was the most extravagantly treasured.

While Bard, at twelve, was gluing yet another scrap of bad leather to the soles of his handed-down boots so as to get another month's wear out of them, the seven-year-old Grethe was being laced into a brand new dress of green and yellow silk. When Bard, at thirteen, was easing his drunk father's head down on a sack of wheat for a pillow in their drafty house, Grethe was being tucked into a feather bed by a mother who stroked her hair and kissed her cheek. And when Bard was fourteen, doggedly humming a new song to himself so he wouldn't have to listen to the group of younger lads who followed him through town tossing spoiled vegetables at the backs of his legs, little Grethe was cozied up in her father's lap, reading a brightly-illustrated history of Dale from the Master's own library.

Grethe was the only daughter of the house, and was doted on as even her elder brother Bain was not. Her family possessed both wealth and status, for her father was scribe to the Master of Laketown and knew at least as much about its laws and statutes as the elector did himself. When she was little, and brought to meet the Master who had been but recently raised to office, he had patted the top of her head and whispered conspiratorially that she was welcome to any book in his library, as he wasn't much of a reader himself and they oughtn't go to waste. She grew up reading grand accounts of Men and Elves and Dwarves, and long tomes of epic poetry, and Elvish volumes of philosophy and natural history. In her father's personal library she could find books with talking animals and morals, and little girls who fell asleep for a hundred years or fell into enchanted pools with treasure at the bottom, and Queens who raised lowly chimney-sweeps from poverty to royalty on account of their virtue. Only one bookshelf was kept locked. Her mother wore the key to it on her big iron chatelaine, and would open it every few weeks and sit in the striped armchair with a mug of honeyed buttermilk and a big plate of biscuits, sighing over some book or another with her hand on her heart. Grethe once sneaked into the locked bookcase and read The Doom of Túrin Turambar from beginning to end, but that ended with her in tears, huddled in her mother's lap, while her father wrung his hands and paced and wondered what he had done to deserve so unnaturally precocious a child.

The answer to this was that Grethe was so cosseted and adored that it never occurred to her that there was a thing she might not do. She was pretty and large-eyed, with chestnut-colored hair that shone like duchess satin, and plump pink cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. There had been some difficulty about her birth which made her parents fear they might lose her, but she had been a very easy baby after that. In many ways she was still an easy child, in spite of her precociousness, for there was nothing spiteful or quarrelsome in her nature, and if she was perhaps a bit spoiled, she was not, on the whole, selfish.

When she was very small she idolized her brother Bain, some twelve years her senior. Bain and Grethe were not very much alike, but they loved each other, and he could always spare a few minutes to read to her if she asked, and it was he who taught her to do some of the fancier strokes in the shallows on the southeast bank of the Lake. Mostly he was busy with schooling, and later on with learning his father's business, but he found time for her even when they were apart. He practiced his penmanship by scratching out little stories about pretty brown-haired girls who went on adventures and found charmed rings and magical swords, and then sewed the pages together and presented them to her bound in velvet or leather. And although it was not their parents' intention that Grethe should follow her brother and her father into business, Bain always gave his old lesson-books to her because she passionately desired to know everything he did.

Cosseted as she was, Grethe was not left to run wild. She had a governess for most of her childhood. Miss Matlin was affectionate and capable, and taught Grethe to stitch a straight seam without even looking, and later, to work flowers and birds and celestial bodies in colored silk thread on velvet. She taught her young charge to dress herself to advantage, to sing and to play a little harp, and to dance. Papa taught her to read in two languages, and to speak in four. Mama taught her to mix a hundred different remedies for sickness, and to recognize their needs and uses, and to draw competently. Like all the children of Laketown, she did not have to learn to swim, but came out knowing it already.


A/N: My eternal gratitude goes out to celestial1 for dreaming up this headcanon, letting me write it all down and then beta-ing it. If you enjoy this story, I entreat you to head over to her page for more excellent stories about Bard and the -lings.