Chapter Fifteen

Nÿr leaned against her pack, immensely grateful to be riding the skid up the hill at the gentle, plodding pace of the draft animal. She had three patients to tend—two head wounds who'd been knocked senseless, and Skirfir, who'd been dosed with a potent painkiller that was making him unusually chatty.

"So…why the pack?" Skirfir asked, his words a little slurred.

"It was part of a plan I've since abandoned."

Skirfir frowned. "Tell me."

"Pretty insignificant now."

"Tell me anyway."

"Rumors…stirred up Dale."

"Your foster mother?"

She shook her head. "No. Ruby's no problem."

"The Dale man."

She looked at her hands, fidgeting with a roll of bandages. "You heard?"

"Kili," he winced as they rode over a rough patch. "Wasn't bothered by it."

"He already knew, Skirf. It's everyone else who's the problem."

"Huh."

His eyes closed and they rode in silence for a while.

"So you were running away in the middle of winter. Good plan," he murmured. "Really, really good idea."

"If you can muster that level of sarcasm," she chided. "I'm going to stop feeling sorry for you."

He looked like he might have laughed had he not been so heavily sedated.

"Don't worry," she said more seriously. "It only took a couple hours in the cold for me to realize what a bad decision it was." She frowned as they crossed another rough patch, getting up on her knees to tuck a rolled blanket tighter against Skirfir's back as a brace. She checked the two other patients on the skid, concerned about keeping them warm, then took her place next to Skirfir again.

"So everything's all right, then?" Skirfir asked. "With you and my Commander?"

"Why are you so worried about it?" she teased.

But the lad was serious. "He's lonely, Nÿr. We all see it."

"Oh, Skirf." She leaned her head back. "I want to fix things, but where do I even start?"

"Well," Skirfir said after a long minute, a ghost of a smile on his face. "Maybe if you give me your stone raven..."

The King and two Princes of Erebor were immediately given a snow-skid and a mounted escort. The captain of the Western Outpost seemed to take their safety as a personal mission.

"The sooner we have you back inside the Mountain, the sooner all this excitement is over," he barked.

Kili, exhausted, didn't fuss the fellow. He was simply glad to stretch out flat instead of ride or walk, and this way he could close his eyes, even if he didn't sleep. He was still too full of battle nerves for that.

But he did rest, his ears alert for ravens, ambushes, voices in the woods… And he leaned back with his sword across his body, unsheathed, his hand on the hilt. Beside him sat a bow and a full quiver of yellow-fletched arrows.

He thought that Fjalar would go back to sleep, but the lad sat shoulder-to-shoulder against his father, slender youth against muscled warrior, asking a hundred questions.

Fili was busy answering them as best he could. The lad was just trying to make sense of what had happened. Good luck with that, Kili thought. Though he couldn't fault the lad for trying. It was a far better reaction than sitting and feeling sorry for himself.

"But why do they want to kill us?" Fjalar asked. "I heard them talking. They want to kill you, Uncle Kili, me…"

"We are Sons of Durin, Fjalar," Fili began, his husky voice lulling Kili into memory as he retold a tale both glorious and tragic. He could almost hear Thorin's voice, relating this same history to two young lads, one light, one dark, so many years ago in front of a plain hearth in the halls of Ered Luin…

Fili kicked his boot and Kili started awake, realizing he'd been lost in thought.

"I said," Fjalar was looking at him. "What do you think?"

Kili's brain backtracked. "About why Durin's Sons are hunted?"

Fjalar nodded.

Kili sighed. "At the very root of it…if Sauron couldn't have us, then he wanted no one to have us. He wanted our mithril, our spell magic. We would have made powerful servants to Mordor."

Fjalar was blinking. "Why does anybody have to have us? Why can't we just have ourselves?"

"Ah," Fili answered. "Well, everybody needs friends, Fjalar. Like Dale. They helped us a great deal today."

The questions went on, and Kili followed them more closely now.

"Da?" Fjalar's intonation told Kili that he was beginning a new topic.

"Yes, son?"

"There was something else I heard them talking about that I don't understand." Kili heard the lad detail a rather explicit act of unusual intimacy, complete with gutter language.

"Why would anybody do that?" the lad asked, clearly baffled.

Kili turned his spontaneous laugh into a coughing fit.

Fili punched his arm.

Kili opened his eyes to see his brother pinching the bridge of his nose, his son looking up at him expectantly.

"I think," Fili managed to say, "That's really the kind of question that uncles answer better than dads."

Fjalar's eyes turned to him and Kili stared back, completely at a loss for words.

It wasn't until sunset that Kili had time to think alone. His afternoon had been packed: food, bath, change of clothes, debriefings, changes to the guard rotations to make their routine less predictable…

But now he stood by himself on the western terrace, watching the sun drop to the distant horizon and waiting to see if any last ravens would come by to report. So far, they all said the same thing. Goblins were dead. Nothing between here and the Wood of the Greenleaves.

That was good, though he certainly had plenty of other things to think about. The Slaghead plot for revenge against his brother was no longer at the top of his list, but five of that banished group were still unaccounted for. He could hope that they were long gone, spending the rest of their days happily working some far underground mine. Time would tell.

And he wasn't worried about Duf any longer. He'd exchanged messages back and forth with the Dale ravenspeaker at mid-afternoon, thanking Young Bard for his assistance on the field of battle. Bard was apparently leading celebrations in town, given the ravens were calling him "silly Bard" when they spoke about him. Kili interpreted that as "drunken Bard." He wondered if Bofur was still down there, enjoying a roaring party at Ruby's.

The other things he worried about were curiously knotting together in his brain. He knew he needed sleep, that things would sort better when he'd rested a few days.

But for now, his young nephew (now home safe), his intended (or maybe his no longer intended), and even the structure of Erebor's security (obviously compromised) swirled together in his head.

And finally, his thoughts settled on Nÿr.

She'd been in the woods this morning because she'd been leaving. That was plain to him.

He couldn't see it as sheer accident, though. The cause was mean-spirited information purposefully circulated by a Slaghead. That the gossip had spread like flashfire through Erebor and that it had driven her to leave wasn't necessarily her fault, though it wasn't the best reaction she could have had.

Part of him wished he could leave with her. Just take a pack–the two of them heading out into those lands that he could see and not touch...make for the Blue Mountains. Stop in the Shire. See things he'd always meant to go see.

Always hoped to go see.

But while she might leave Erebor and live her life elsewhere, he could not. That reality made his heart sink, and not for the first time since surviving the battle that had killed his uncle, did he feel the deep, bitter unfairness of it.

The morgul curse that lived in his blood not only made his life hell once a year on Durin's Day. It made him easy prey to wraith spells…in fact, if he left the lands of Erebor, it would draw those fell things to him as sure as he could call a raven.

And that kind of evil was still out there.

It had happened before, to his grandfather. No one liked to talk about it, but Thrain had been so damaged by the time the dark forces had finished with him that he was unrecognizable.

Kili had seen what the knowledge of it had done to Thorin.

And he didn't want that. Not for himself and even more, not for Fili.

And that was the other truth.

He could not walk away from his brother.

Not willingly.

Kili finally turned and climbed back to the upper level of the western terrace, stopping to look back as the sun finally dipped below the distant ridgeline of the Misty Mountains.

If Nÿr truly wanted to leave, he would let her go with good grace...though as he told himself this, he realized how deeply he had come to love her.

But he wouldn't stop her.

Because having to stay was a completely different thing than wanting to stay.

It was well past the change of the midnight watch when Kili finally took himself to Jormund the Apothecary's statue. Earlier in the evening, he'd visited Skirfir in the infirmary and found the lad deep in a drugged sleep with the small dragonstone carving of a raven clutched in his hand.

Kili recognized it as Nÿr's. He understood the message easily enough. Meet me in the study. Skirfir was ever their trusted go-between, after all.

What he didn't understand was her intent...but damned if he would wake the lad and ask him.

So now here he was, at the crossroads so to speak. Go in, or don't go in.

He wasn't entirely sure she was still there, and he knew he may have missed his chance. He also wasn't entirely sure he was ready to face her, since there was at least one possible outcome here that he really didn't want to confront. She could be leaving.

And part of him wouldn't blame her.

**A/N: If you'd like a music reference for those last two scenes, it's Passenger/Let Her Go.**