Nori takes a few days to find the place that she will eventually come to call home for the next several years. She needs a building with at least two bedrooms, although three would be better to allow her to have an office, and space for a workroom by having either a separate living room, dining room or both. Such places are hard to come by in this part of town, being normally occupied by two or three families living together to save money, and the cost of renting such a place will eat into Nori's pay from Thorin fairly deeply. Fortunately she is a good enough thief to be able to steal anything she might desperately need, or at least the funds for it, and she is not the sort to really horde belongings anyway. She much prefers buying what she needs as and when she needs it.
If she cannot steal it that is.
Ori has no problem putting her up for a few more nights, in fact he pushes for her to stay longer still and it is good to see the independent dwarf he has become after leaving their childhood home in this life as he did not in her first. Dori does not intend it, but his need to mother someone often comes out closer to smothering and while Nori was always able to fight back against it, Ori had been raised more by their mutual older sibling and so deferred to him more. On the subject of getting her own place, however, Nori is set. She cannot run her little pack out of Ori's home, and she cannot ask him to allow Kíli to turn up at the drop of a hat either. It is time she grew up properly and got her own place.
It will make it easier to sneak out to see Dwalin as well and Nori is nothing if not predictable when she finds someone who can satisfy her needs.
The house she finds is almost perfect for her needs. There are only two bedrooms upstairs, but the downstairs is made up of a small kitchen with a separate living room and dining room. She just has space in the kitchen for a small table to eat at, which is all she will really need given that she does not make a habit of entertaining others. If necessary she can always take people into her office, it was never anything formal in her old life and it will not be much formal in her new life either. Although she will have a desk this time, she learnt from her last life that not having one was more trouble than it was really worth.
She pays her first month of rent quite happily, buys two beds and mattresses from another landlord who is clearing a house of a previous tennant's belongings after months of non-payment, and moves into an otherwise empty new home. Pots and pans are easy enough to find, as is a small table with two chairs and a pair of high backed armchairs, and those are also quickly installed. Her desk has to be specially made since she wants several hidden compartments built into it and that eats even deeper into her purse. Far more so than she would like even though the wage Thorin is paying her is more than even Dwalin is given, something she knows from her past life. Setting up her room for poisons and antidotes will have to wait. Nori rarely uses them anyway and is perfectly happy with lifting a floorboard under her bed to store the few small vials of it that she has underneath. She will be in this house for years, with luck, and so she can afford to take her time setting it all up the way that she wants to.
Kíli's thief test is scheduled for a week after she moves into her little house and Nori worries about him. She knows that he will pass, he is too good not to pass, but it concerns her all the same. It concerns her so much, in fact, that she visits Tibar again to ask him to give her a few days head start with Kíli in tow if he does fail so that she can get him somewhere safe, or on his way to somewhere safe.
"Do you really think he isn't ready?" Tibar asks, arching an eyebrow.
"No," Nori shakes her head, "but if he messes up we don't want to bring Thorin and Dís down on our heads. Just trying to keep my own skin intact, you understand, I'll still be here to take my shearing if I need to."
"You won't," Tibar replies. "I've spent a bit of time watching the pair of you the last few days. That boy might one day be better than I am. Which would be concerning, but I suspect his uncle and mother have plans for him that don't involve being too deeply sucked into Guild life."
"You always were too bright for your own good," Nori observes.
"Svejir said it would be my downfall," Tibar admits, "he might be right about that one day. I'll give him the head start, if only because I don't want to see you go through the same thing with him that you went through with Staal." Nori grunts, bowing her head. "Staal wasn't your fault, you know. Mavik was pushing for his test."
"I know that, and I said he wasn't ready," she cuts in.
"I said the same," Tibar tells her. "You think I don't watch our trainees to see how they're doing? We've had fewer failures since I took on this role and that's because I refuse to allow tests to be booked for those who aren't ready unless they're taking the piss. Which Staal was."
"I know," Nori admits. "And I tried everything I could think of and more to get him to get his act together. He didn't want to be one of us."
"And that's what got him killed," Tibar concludes. "Not you. You didn't fail him. He failed himself. If Trygve could pass so well, and Var as well, there was no reason for Staal to fail except that he wanted to."
"Why tell me this now?" She demands. "You've never cared before."
"Svejir's getting worse," Tibar's voice is soft. "You and him are all I really have when it comes to family."
"You can hardly stand me," Nori reminds him gently.
"True," Tibar agrees, "but there are plenty of times that you can't stand your older brother either. Doesn't mean you don't care about him."
"Aye, well, Dori and me aren't exactly understanding of each other," she shrugs. "You and me are too alike."
"Except you have all your limbs," Tibar points out. "Fucking wargs."
"That I could drink to," Nori smiles. "You do good for being an arm down, better than I would."
"You're selling yourself short, you're adaptable, a lot more than some of the other idiots we're surrounded by. I doubt Thorin made you Wolf just because you're training his sister's son."
"Been going through Alstin's files again?" She teases and he shoots her an irritated glare.
"You want to know our top graduates? You're either building a pack or a gang," Tibar says.
"They're basically the same thing in the grand scheme of it all. You want in?"
"On the fringes," her eyebrows go up in surprise. "I see and hear a lot when I'm watching the apprentices and pulling my own small jobs," everyone in an administrative position within the Guild gets a wage, the percentage taken from active members goes towards paying those who keep things running. "I can't be in fully due to this," he waves his hand around the meticulously organised office, "but I can pass on things that might be of interest to you and Trygve. For a small fee."
"Why Trygve?" She asks with a smile, Tibar obviously knows her better than she realised.
"Because he was your best apprentice, and I know the two of you are still close," he arches an eyebrow. "Who else would you trust more to be second?"
"Too smart for your own good," Nori reminds him, "but I'll take the help all the same. See you in a few days."
Tibar does not bother to reply, not that Nori expects him to, and she departs the Guild building a little more comfortable with the idea that Kíli will pass his test with ease. As confident as she often seems to those around her, Nori has plenty of experiences in her past which often make her question how she handles a situation. Staal will forever be the apprentice who makes her question how she trains Kíli. No matter how good of a job she did with her first two, Staal was her great failure and while every thief will have one apprentice who does not pass one test or the other, Nori knows that she carries the blame for this one far more than any of her fellows allow themselves to. Being a thief tends to harden a dwarf, their world is harsh and without any real security. Some days they might manage to steal more than most dwarves make in a month, others they might find that they have managed to get little more than a dirty scrap of cloth which might have once been a handkerchief. The latter is a more common daily outcome than the former unless, like Nori and a few others, the thief is skilled enough and confident enough to move without too much notice through the better parts of town, and that quickly hardens a person to when their day to day life is so much of a struggle anyway. The loss of an apprentice due to failing their test is simply seen as a sign that the apprentice in question was not suited to their type of life.
This does not mean that Nori agrees with it, she hates the fact that an apprentice who fails their first test is more often than not killed because they know too much about the inner workings of the Guild with none of the loyalties that come with being a full member. That knowledge is dangerous to thieves in general, a desperate person in the clutches of the guard can reveal all sorts of things and while the Guild will not normally step in apprentices are taught how to escape nearly every cell they might find themselves in. If they were caught while working as part of a crew, that crew is expected to go in and help them or risk losing the trust of anyone else they might hope to work with in future, but a thief on their own is a thief out of luck. The rules are the rules, and they have served the Guild well for far longer than Nori has lived or ever will.
Tha advantage, of course, with the pack that she is putting together is that it will give her a legitimate way to send Dwalin in to let loose whichever one of her people might get caught. That kind of power brings loyalty and loyalty is something that Nori will require in this line of work.
In between giving Kíli a few last minute tips, teaching him a couple of tricks that he has apparently already learnt from watching her, and reading through the names and files of those thieves and spies that were on the list Tibar gave her, Nori flits from Ori's to her house while grabbing the odd meal from taverns and street vendors. At the same time she searches out pawn shops and a variety of stores which might carry the things she needs ready made to fill out her little house. She has no objection to having to order some things new, because that is how the world works, but she has no need for it to be pristine and no requirement beyond her purchase being functional. Except the little vials for poison. Those are, as a rule, single use only and they must be in pristine condition. It is impossible to be certain that the concentrated poison has been cleaned entirely from the inside of the vial and it is a bad idea to risk mixing them since the effects can be unpredictable.
All too soon, with everything that she has to accomplish, the day of Kíli's test comes around.
A.N: Who thinks I need to put together a handy character reference list for you all? I'm starting to think that I do. I should have known that a fourteen year time frame with Nori actually being involved in the world would create a load of extra named background characters to keep straight. I now fully understand why Tolkien managed to come out with so many dozens of characters