Nori and Kíli leave the night after she learns of Fíli's expected departure. The lads agree to a little play acting, with Kíli pitching something of a fit about being both left behind and the last to know about his brother's impending trip. He then storms out, Fíli on his heels, to spend some time in a tavern drinking, playing his fiddle, and flirting before being seen leaving with a lass Nori knows well enough to know will keep her mouth shut about Kíli not coming home with her. The lass takes great pride in being able to charm and bed anyone she chooses, it will not sit well with her to admit that she was turned down. All that done, Kíli arrives at Dori's in the middle of the night, grabs the pack of travelling things that belong to Cadan which have remained there since his return to Ered Luin, and he and Nori depart under cover of darkness. There are ways out of town after the gates have closed if one knows the right people and has the coin. Nori happens to have both.
By the time that it is late enough in the day for Kíli to be missed, which is generally in the afternoon these days when he is expected to practice with his brother, Nori and Kíli are miles away, having travelled through the night without stopping and moving at a far greater pace than they usually would. Dís will send someone after them, although she will have no idea that they have taken the mountain route south rather than heading into the lowlands, and she will not be able to send Dwalin, who will have already signed the contract tying him to the caravan with Fíli. Nor will she be able to prevent her eldest from departing for the same reason. Nori knows this, because this is not far from the way that Kíli had reportedly reacted to his brother's departure during her first life and one of her first jobs while working for Thorin had been to track the boy down. Not knowing the boy all that well had made the job a challenge, and although she had resented being used as a hunting dog, she had known more about who to approach and how Kíli might have gotten out of town than the rest of his family would have. That she only managed to finally track him down in Bree and had then spent a year on the caravan with him had been annoying, but it did the job and persuaded the lad to stay home due to the trouble he had signing on to any other caravans.
This time joining the caravans has a use. It gets Kíli out of town so that he can practice picking pockets in different environments, it gets him into different settlements and places so that he can see what the people there are like and learn the quirks of their speech and behaviour. It will give him the opportunity to come up against orcs and the pair of them will be able to practice their fighting style without being questioned for it. Plus it will get them to Ered Nimrais with money in their pocket without having had to pay out for food and board on the way. The return journey will have the same benefit, along with a winter in Labamgarel Zarrakh will be good for the lad's training as well before he comes home to take his thief's test.
It takes them a little over a week to reach the trading town in the southernmost point of the Blue Mountains moving as fast as they can along the mountain routes. To her surprise, Kíli does not complain about the pace, which is welcome, but nor does he seem to regret the way that he took his leave of his mother which is a little more troubling for Nori. The caravan routes are dangerous, and it is not just the threat of orcs near the Misty Mountains that have the merchants hiring guards. There are plenty of bandits as well who haunt the roads to try and extort money or simply steal entire shipments. Any time there is a fight there is a chance it will be your last so if there is anyone you are leaving behind you try to leave on good terms. Had Kíli not done this exact thing in Nori's previous life she might have tried to prevent it this time, no matter how good it would be for him, out of simple concern that it would be a change too much.
Kíli shrugs when she asks him about why he was so happy to leave his home on a bad note with his mother and uncle, although she suspects that Thorin is more understanding of it all than he is willing to let on. In truth, Nori does not really expect an answer to her question, she knows what it is to have a parent who disapproves of the path given by Mahal. It might, on her return, be time to tell Dís a few hard truths. If she does not get arrested, that is, for helping Kíli get out of town and join the caravans. It is something she should be more worried about than she is. Nori has gotten herself out of a few places in her time, some harder to escape than others, and she knows the dungeons beneath Thorin's Hall better than the king will ever know. It will not even be a challenge to get out of those.
Besides, she helped him make them more secure in her last life.
They arrive the evening before a caravan is due to depart, which Nori chooses to see as good fortune. The guard master is a crotchety old dwarf with hair of steel and a vicious scar over where his left eye should be, the socket hollow and the eyelids scarred closed over it. He accepts their application to join up easily, likely more out of desperation than guilability. Their story is a simple one and sprinkled with half truths to add plausibility to the outright lies it contains. Nori is Cadan's aunt, left with his care since his father's passing over the winter due to getting mixed up in the wrong barroom brawl. That detail is not even a lie, Hadan had been killed just before Yule while breaking up a fight in one of the less savoury taverns. Kíli's much softened Iron Hills accent is explained by Hadan bringing him to Ered Luin from the Iron Hills when the lad was no more than twenty after his mother's passing, since this was where all Hadan's family could be found. Cadan is a passable smith, and a good hunter, but he has not found his true craft and Nori plays that as their family having too little money to provide him the opportunities which might allow him to find it. She, she claims, is a musician by trade, but they all know that there is little coin in being a musician unless you have the connections to get you noticed by the well off so many end up travelling and working guard duty on the caravans if they wish to avoid the mines.
"Your Da left you with nothing, lad?" The guard master enquires.
"About the only thing he left me was his debts," Cadan grumbles. "You can't piss and booze those away."
"No, you can't," the older dwarf sympathises. "They call me Asger and I've been working this route for near on sixty years now. We'll be taking the road until we hit the Greenway after the Sarnford crossing of the Baranduin and then we'll detour up to Bree to drum up a few more guards before going back down through Dunland to Labamgarel Zarrakh in Ered Nimrais. It's fifteen gold payment for the journey there, another fifteen on the way back if we get along and you fancy wintering there. That includes three good meals a day. No obligations to make the return trip with us, though, there's normally plenty happy enough to sign on in Ered Nimrais."
"You have trouble getting people signing on here?" Nori asks.
"We're further south than most want to travel to find a caravan to sign onto," Asger shrugs, "and we only run out three a year anyway. The second and third don't make the return trip from Labamgarel Zarrakh, which puts a lot off unless they can find a caravan there that's leaving when we arrive. We can usually find a few in Bree who don't mind that risk. Most in Bree are only there looking for work anyway."
"Be a winter away, lad," Nori says to Kíli as though they have not discussed it beforehand.
"I'd rather be away, Aunt," he replies.
"Sign us up for the full trip, then," Nori smiles. "I assume there are places we'll be able to stay when we get there?" Something else she knows the answer to, but it's better not to let too many know that.
"There's hostels," Asger nods. "They're not pretty, mind, you'll be four to a room so I suggest you make a couple of friends on the way to bunk with, and the facilities are shared between the six rooms on each floor, but they only cost six siver a month or two silver a week and come with breakfast so you won't starve."
"We can always see if there's a caravan back when we get there if we don't like the room, Aunt," Klíi suggests, "or move on to another town and see if we can find work."
"There's always work in Labamgarel Zarrakh, lad," Asger chuckles, "even if it's just digging out the white stone." He gets to his feet. "We leave at dawn, if you're not there I'll tear up your contracts, I can't deal with the hassle of sending someone to look you up, but I'll remember your faces and make sure you don't work with any caravan out of here again. I've no patience for time wasters."
"See you in the morning," Nori nods, dragging Kíli from the table to find a room for the night.
It is not difficult to find a place, there is also a hostel here due to the caravans from Labamgarel Zarrakh which often remain here over winter, though most of them depart with the first shipment of the year. It costs them nine coppers each for the night, but it is only the two of them in the cramped room. There is no window and the room is only just wide enough for there to be a walkway the width of the door between the two sets of bunk beds which are pressed against opposite walls to either side. There is no bedding either, only straw mattresses, and the pair lay their bedrolls on the lower bunks before eating a quick, cold meal of cheese and bread purchased from the small market as it closed on their way to the hostel. The food on route, at least, should be decent. Nori knows from experience that five gold is low as payment, and by the time they come to recruit others in Bree it will be less still, but those merchants who pay less tend to feed their teams better. On some of the caravans with the highest wages a dwarf is lucky if they are fed at all and no guard master promises good food if he cannot keep his word, especially not one who has spent six decades working the same caravan. Sometimes all that is needed to retain loyalty is a full belly and reliable work.
At least half of that, Nori thinks, is something that the Thorin of the quest could have done with remembering.
A.N: Labamgarel Zarrakh does not exist in Tolkien lore. I made it up. As far as I could find there aren't actually any dwarf settlements in Ered Nimrais (which is incidentally the range Aragorn passed through part of when collecting his army of the dead). The place name is cobbled together thanks to Dwarrowscholar's Khuzdul dictionary and means "The white cave towers", which gives some idea of what it'll probably end up looking like when I get there. Between fighting with the super, super slow ancient former media centre computer (roughly 9 years old, so older than my daughter and painfully slow to run, but it's about the size of my hand, so you know), assignment time, crochet Kili, the temperamental chromebook and all the rest typing can be a bit difficult. I'm achieving more on my phone than on a computer half the time. Possibility of weird typos is pretty high. I've tried to catch them, but I've started to get a bit typo blind.