Here you go. I'm sorry it's so late, but I'm busy. And will be busy until I am no longer busy. Expect an update then.
Ilma smiled up at Beorn as he poured her a glass of milk. Well, it was more a tankard than a glass, but it was a lot smaller than the glasses the dwarves held. She had a feeling that Beorn didn't like them.
Well, at the moment neither did she.
Mice wound their way around shallow bowls and over hands only to be brushed off by careless dwarven hands. Ilma snorted. Of course, leave it to dwarves to be more intent on eating than making friends. She cooed at the tiny white mammals who came to greet her, offering them bits of friut and gruel as Beorn addressed the Company.
"So you are the one they call Oakenshield?" Thorin didn't answer, instead adjisting his arms where they crossed over his chest in some display of male posturing. "Tell me, why is Azog the Defiler hunting you?"
"You know of Azog?" The dwarf king asked, actually looking up from his brooding. "How?"
Ilma refrained from jumping when her giant new friend placed one hand on her shoulder, swallowing it.
"Our people," he began, and Ilma felt a warmth spread in her chest. "Were the first to live in the mountains, before the Orcs came down from the North. The Defiler...killed most of my family, but some he enslaved." Ilma placed a comforting hand over his, looking up at him as he continued. "Not for work, you understand, but for sport. Caging skin changers - torturing them - seemed to amuse him."
There was a moment of silence as the Company digested that as Beorn made his way around the table, pouring milk into tankards.
"There are others like you?" Bilbo asked, and Ilma hid her wince in her cup.
"Once there were many," the bear answered quietly.
"And now?" Really, Bilbo?
"Now there are only two."
Ilma smiled widely, taking the opportunity to lessen the tension. "That's one more than you thought there were, am I right?"
Beorn chuckled, the sound like grating rocks. "Yes, yes it is, little wolfling."
"Hey, now," she retorted. "I may be little, but I am no child. I'm at least a full millenia, by my reckoning." Take the years you remember, add them to the years you forgot...
"What is that compared to the lives of your people?" Beorn countered, and she pouted as he ruffled her hair. Sobering, he turned back to the dwarves. "You need to reach the mountain before the last days of Autumn?"
"By Durin's day, yes," Gandalf supplied. A surly Thorin glared up at Beorn, his mouth twisted into a frown.
"How can you know this?"
"I told him," Ilma admitted, shrugging away his animosity. "I didn't see any harm in it, and I still don't. He would know better than we how to get there without undue complications. We are running out of time."
"Which is why we must go through Mirkwood." Ilma wouldn't have thought it possible, but Thorin's scowl deepened. One day, his face was going to set that way.
"A darkness lies upon that forest, fell things creep beneath those trees. There is an alliance between the Orcs and the necromancer of Dol Goldur. I would not venture there unless in great need."
Ilmas grip on her cup tightened as Gandalf suggested the elven road, her mind wandering to soft green memories she might never live again.
"Safe?" Beorn's voice brought Ilma back to the present. "The wood elves of Mirkwood are not like their kin. They are less wise, and more dangerous."
"I like to think we're not all bad," Ilma mumbled, here eyes on Thorin's retreating back. Even from where she sat across the room, she could see the anger in his stance.
"It matters not," Beorn replied, giving her a reproving look. "These lands are crawling with Orcs. Their numbers are growing, and you are on foot. You will never reach the forest alive."
Note to self, never spend your life alone with no hope for a future. It will make you morbid.
Beorn stood, closing in on Thorin while holding his gaze. "I don't like dwarves. They're greedy." True. "And blind." Um. "Blind to the lives they deem lesser than their own." Ah, also true. The giant skin changer stopped just before Thorin, caressing a mouse, so small in his hand, as he seemed to consider something. "But Orcs I hate more."
Well, obviously.