Middle-earth, and all who dwell within it, belongs to Tolkien. I am grateful to him for growing this beautiful garden in which our imaginations can play. Please review!

Fili would have ridden them harder on that first day and arrived at the inn with daylight to spare, but Betta's poor horsemanship made that impossible. The sun was below the horizon before they came in sight of the town less than eight leagues from the dwarf home at Ered Luin.

The rain caught them still an hour from their destination, and they rode the last few miles with their heads down in the shivering cold. The hard ground of the mountain hills far above had already frozen and the falling water ran in rills and small streams down the slope to the road where it mingled with the bare earth into a thickening mud. Their ponies struggled through it but, in the end, the three riders were forced to dismount and lead the animals or risk losing themselves and their baggage to the mire.

Just outside the village, the road bent around what would have been swampy ground on a dry day. In the rain, it was a flooding mess, and it spread across the road. There was no choice but to wade through. Kili cursed and Fili grumbled. Betta said nothing; she did not want to open her mouth and taste the foul mud on her tongue.

By the time they arrived at the inn, they were all three of them covered up to their knees in slime. Their hands and arms and faces were smeared with it and their boots carried mud three inches thick at least. The ponies were painted with it as well, but they did not seem to mind.

The innkeeper was not happy to rent rooms to three so dirty travellers, but there was little business in the cold seasons, and he was happy to take their money and raised his prices accordingly. Fili had no choice but to hire the rooms: one large enough for two beds for the dwarves, and a second that was smaller but connected to the first with a door and had also a door of its own onto the landing. It had not been furnished as a guest room, but Fili ordered a cot set up for Betta so that she had privacy but was still near enough that he could keep an eye on her. He did not mistrust her, but he did not trust her or the men of this far outpost. They were not the men and dwarves of Ered Luin, however close their town may lay to the mountains.

Their ponies were wiped down and stabled behind the inn, but the three travellers carried their packs up the narrow stairs to their rooms. Betta looked around her closet. She had a window, at least, and she opened it wide. They all stank with mud. Fili had demanded water for washing, and they had only to sit silently smelling the stink of each other for a short while before two boys arrived bearing full buckets and two large pans. The water was cold, but it was clean and there was lots of it.

The dwarves washed their faces and hands, but spent more water cleaning their leather coats and boots, and their weapons than they did cleaning themselves. Betta took a pan and a bucket of water into her room and closed the door. The mud had soaked her clothes through to the skin and she was forced to undress and put on her spare pants and shirt; she washed herself before her clothes. They could suffer the mud better than she, and she knew that there would be water in plenty for laundry once they were in the wild where rivers and streams were free.

Worse than her clothes, however, was her hair. She wished that she had thought to cut it short before they left the mountain. The mud had soaked into it and then dried there in a solid mass and she had to sit with her head upside-down in the tub for a long while before it came free. As she sat, feeling foolish, she blamed the dwarves for all her troubles. If she had had her own way, they would have taken cover from the storm the moment it started, but Fili had been determined to reach the inn. If she had had her own way, she also would not have had to lead a skittish pony through a flood, either.

When most of the mud had been soaked away, she wrung out the water and took an old bone-handled comb from her pack. It was long work to comb out her tangles. In the next room, she could hear the dwarves talking together, and she went to the door to listen.

"A little rain and already you sulk like a wet blanket, brother," Fili said. "Dry off, and then tell me what you think."

"I think that only a fool travels north in winter. And we are two very handsome fools. What inn rents a room with neither fire nor food!?"

"There is food, only you must go down for it. If you are ashamed to show your matted beard down below, then I suppose that I must play the servant and bring it up to you. There's no reason to break into our stores before we must."

"There may be someone we can buy from here," Kili said. "You rushed us away in such a hurry, damned if we didn't miss something in the packing."

"You have no one to impress here, brother. Comb your beard with your fingers, if you must, but I will not listen to you complain all night."

Betta heard heavy footsteps cross the room and then a door open. It closed, and she guessed that Fili had gone down to find something for dinner. She hoped that he would remember her when he brought it up, but if he didn't, then she would break into her "stores" as he put it rather than go down herself. She had packed plenty, and one could usually find food in the wilderness, though probably nothing fit for dwarf royalty.

She finished combing her hair and tied it in a knot on top of her head, out of the way until she could braid it properly. She took what was left of the clean water and a cloth and lay her cloak and coat out on the floor to wipe off as much mud as she could. There was a knock on the door between their rooms and, without waiting for her answer, Kili entered.

"Do you bring a…?" He stopped short in surprise.

Betta held her knife in her hand, ready to fight, but she saw that he had no weapons. She lowered her arm. Kili stood in the doorway, his short stature highlighted by the man-sized frame, looking more than a little like a drowned rat in his damp clothes. His hair hung limp about his ears, and his beard was ragged and still dirty. The mud had done more than stink. It had stuck as well. She tried not to laugh at his sullen expression.

Kili frowned and ran his fingers through his beard, trying unsuccessfully to smooth it. Betta took pity on him, and she took out her comb from her pack again. "I know that dwarves are proud of their beards, but if they are vain as well, shouldn't they carry their own combs?" she said.

"It was forgotten in the packing," he muttered.

She stepped closer to him and held out the comb, but he did not take it. He was staring at her, or to one side of her. "What is this?" he said. "There is a mark there." He reached out his hand toward her right temple.

She stepped back and raised her knife.

He put up his hands. "Perhaps the mud has stained your skin," he said. "What is that mark?"

"Do I ask a history of every scrape and scar on your body?" she said angrily. She loosened her hair and pulled it down to cover her ears again.

"I meant no offense. I apologize," Kili said, but he was looking at her suspiciously again, as he had when the stood together in the passage of the great wall before Ered Luin. "Fili will return soon with food for our evening meal. You are welcome to eat with us." He nodded to the comb in her hand. "Will you lend it to me still, or would you force me to wear a bedraggled beard as punishment for asking a question?"

Betta handed him the comb. "We are all in short temper tonight," she said. "I hope that it is not an omen for the journey to come."

Kili agreed. "I will knock when Fili returns."

He returned to his room, and Betta closed the door behind him. At the bottom of her pack, she kept a kept a few careful treasures. A small circle of polished silver that had been as a mirror to her mother was wrapped in cloth. Beside it was a steel razor that had belonged to father. Both were folded into her spare clothes to protect them from the bumps of long travel, and she took out the mirror now to look at the scalp of her right temple.

Sure enough, when she combed back her hair, the lines revealed the edges of a mark on her skin that should have been hidden. The stress and hunger of her long travels had thinned her hair, and it had been long since anyone had stood close enough to see it on her. The dwarves had keener sight than most, and Kili's eyes were sharp even for a dwarf. As she let down her hair again to cover the mark, she was glad that she had not cut it off. She reminded herself that she was no longer travelling alone. She would need to keep her distance and be more careful in the future.

If it had been Fili, and not the younger Kili, she would never have gotten away with it.

.

Kili said nothing to Fili when he returned. He did not know what he had seen, or that he had seen anything. He felt questions returning with his old suspicions. Who was the woman really? Could they trust the account she gave of her own history? Certainly, Kili would not have liked to be questioned on his every scar, and there were many. He knew dwarves that had tattooed their skin, and the stories told in ink were very personal. Thorin's cousin Dwalin had many patterns drawn across his bald head, and more scars on his arms. A dwarf who made light of Dwalin's tattoos would soon learn the value of holding his tongue.

In any case, it was more likely that Kili's eyes had been mistaken, and that the mark was only a new scar, still fresh and not yet faded. He would have thought that he had seen nothing at all, except that Betta was so quick to anger and to cover herself. Fili returned, and Kili said nothing. He did not need to give his brother yet another reason to cause tension in their small group.

The food at the inn was about as appetizing as the mud that they had swam through to get to it, but they ate it anyway. Kili knocked on Betta's door as he had promised, but did not open it uninvited. She joined them for the evening meal, and her hair was braided down her back with a thick lock behind each ear that hid any chance he might have had to catch a glimpse of the mark again.

They ate in silence. Fili was in a sour mood, still feeling the grime of the swamp on his skin, and Kili felt uncomfortable between the silence of the woman and the scowl of his brother. Betta ate quickly and left them again only speaking to wish them a good-night. She closed the door between their two rooms.

As soon as she had gone, Fili sat back and kicked off his boots. "Your pet woman was quiet tonight, brother," he said.

"She is not my woman," Kili said. "And she is no pet. I thought that you were warming up to her. You two seemed very friendly during the ride, whispering together all the secrets of our family lineage."

Fili stared at him in surprise, and then he shook his head. "I do not wish to argue with you, little brother," he said. He lay down on the rock-hard mat that the innkeeper had the gall to call a bed. "Perhaps I am being ungenerous, but is it too much to ask that the excitement of an adventure last longer than a single day before misery and cold rain have me wishing for home?"

"At least it was only a pool of mud, and not a river," Kili said. "We might have lost all our baggage as well as come out soaking and stinking." He saw his brother smile and was glad. "In any case, there will be more than enough nights for you to be homesick, brother. For now, be glad that we have a roof to shelter under. And comb your beard." He tossed Betta's comb to his brother.

Fili caught it, looked at it and then gave Kili a puzzled look. "This is not yours," he said.

Kili shrugged. "Sometimes it is not so bad to bring a woman along," he explained. "Probably she brought a mirror and scent for her skin as well."

"She certainly smells better than you, dear brother," Fili said, but he combed out his beard and hair and braided it. When he was finished, he felt more like himself again. "We shall see what the new dawn brings us."

Kili blew out the lamp and they lay down for the night. In the next room, Betta was already fast asleep in her bed with a knife under her pillow.

.

The long leagues of riding were enough to wear out even two young dwarves. Kili fell almost immediately to sleep, and Fili lay awake only long enough to hear his brother snoring soundly before he, too, drifted off. They were sleeping deeply in the midnight hour when the door to their room was unlocked and slowly opened. Two men entered with cloth tied around their shoes so that they did not make a sound. They were not dwarves, but in height they were not much taller. Their shoulders were broad and their arms thick, used to heavy labor but not eager for it. These were men who had spent their lives finding faster ways to earn their bread than through honesty and hard work.

The largest man carried a heavy club in his hand. He went to the first cot, recognizing the blonde hair of the dwarf who was the leader of his party. This one had what they wanted, or had held it earlier in the evening, but it would be easier to search bodies than to deal with live dwarves. The second man was smaller than his companion, but the blade of the wicked knife he carried gleamed in the moonlight as he stood over the second cot near the window.

The first man raised his club and took aim, prepared to strike the killing blow.