Kíli's take on the day of his test is level with Nori's on the day that she completed hers, and Nori's take had been the highest for eight decades until Tibar had turned up and done almost twice as well. Now that he has completed his thief's test Kíli could, technically, be done with his apprenticeship. Not that Nori would ever tell his mother that. There is a reason that the path through the Guild goes thief, then spy and then assassin. There are skills in the first two that an assassin will utilise more than most would realise. Kíli could also change mentor if he wanted to, but that would cause a large number of problems under normal circumstances since it implies that the mentor chosen, or the one who chose the apprentice, was a poor fit and may not have trained the apprentice in question to the best of their ability. Staal was one who had been shuffled around poor fitting mentor after mentor until he had been foisted onto Nori three months after she had finished training Trygve.
Little wonder he had failed his test really.
Kíli's success is the last bit of reassurance she needs, beyond burying all thoughts of Staal as deep in her mind as possible, that her third apprentice's failure had not been her fault. His own resentment and unwillingness to learn had been his downfall. Kíli, on the other hand, seems to want to know everything. He and Trygve take to one another like a house on fire, which is lucky given how closely the pair of them will be working together, and the pair of them, with Fíli as well, can often be found in various taverns. Knowing that Trygve is keeping an eye on Kíli in the evenings frees Nori up to spend a little more time with Dwalin. When Dwalin is home anyway.
About two weeks after Kíli passes his test Dís decides that Fíli should get a third caravan under his belt, probably in an attempt to keep him away from Nori and Kíli's influences, and sends him to Bree with the final shipment before winter. Dwalin, naturally, goes with him and the pair do not return until well after Yule, close to Fíli's seventy-second birthday with the remnants of a caravan from Labamgarel Zarrakh which had been hit by orcs early on in their trip. Many of the dwarves there are still recovering from their injuries, one or two riding the wagons due to limbs that are missing as a result of the fighting. It is not a new sight, although this caravan seems to have been hit harder than many of the others in the last few decades and it is a worrying sign that orc numbers are once again on the rise. Nori knows that Azanulbizar drastically reduced the orc numbers in the Misty Mountains, but that was one hundred and thirty years ago and orcs breed like rabbits.
It only serves to remind Nori of just what it is that she is trying to prevent in the future and she takes herself to Dwalin's little house without a thought as soon as she can the night he arrives home. She does not leave until the following night, lying to both of them by saying that she had not been at all worried and that she was merely scratching an itch which had not been satisfactorily attended to while Dwalin was away. He does not call her on it, though she sees a knowing smirk cross his face before he can wipe it away, merely setting himself to exhausting both of them thoroughly. As time passes she finds herself slipping more and more into the habit of staying with him all night. Dwalin never seems to object, even curls tightly around her when she shifts to leave and it nearly always encourages her to stay. As long as they are both in Ered Luin they continue this strange thing between them, gravitating towards one another in a way that is entirely familiar to Nori. She knows she should try to avoid it, try to turn away from it, because it is how things escalate from casually scratching an itch into promises and talk of courting and marriage. She does not pull away, enjoying the comfort of the early days when nothing is complicated by any of the later stuff and it is simply her and Dwalin. She enjoys the simplicity of their conversations when they lie next to one another in bed, naked but for the sheets as they talk about the little nothings which gives the other clues about the one speaking.
Somehow she feels like she is coming to know him better in this life than she ever did in her last. Somehow she begins to hope that this version of Dwalin will never put Thorin ahead of her the way that Dwalin did. For the first time, in either life, she finds herself opening up in a way she has never dared to before. She finds herself telling him about her work, her day to day as she sets up her new home and her small pack. He offers ideas when she is stuck for how to handle things, and somehow it feels like they are working together in the way that they were always meant to, as though the walls she has always kept built high around herself to protect her heart have begun to crumble. The beauty of it being that he never pushes her to tell him anything she does not want to. He asks questions and accepts when she does not or cannot answer, seemingly happy to work with her and help her without expecting more than what they have. He makes her feel like a true partner.
He makes her feel like this time she might actually deserve to be the Wolf.
Galen leaves for the Iron Hills, via Ered Nimrais, two days later with a messenger bird among his possessions. Nori has no desire to wait if he finds something that she needs to be aware of and the bird is a small expense all things considered. Much to her surprise, her old friend thanks her for finding him something honest he can do with the skills he was forced to learn due to a childish mistake. His parents had been unable to pay the fee the Guild asked for in order to look the other way, as quite often happens in poorer families where the young dwarf in question does not appear to have a craft. It is one of the reasons that the Guild deals so harshly with those who fail their first test, after the first there is no obligation to go on and pass the final two, resentment often means that a young one will not do their absolute best to complete the test, perhaps reasoning that if they fail they will be able to go back to their lives. Actually, once the cost of training has been repaid, something which rarely takes more than five or six years, a member of the Guild is free to do whatever they like. Well, free to do whatever they like as long as they pay their yearly Guild fee should they decide to use the skills that they have learnt during their training.
Kíli turns out to be remarkably good at unobtrusively trailing people when he wants to be, especially with the advantage that comes with being able to go into places as himself that he would not be able to get into as Cadan. Nori sets him to trailing members of Thorin's Council as both himself and Cadan, and orders him to retrieve some trinket or piece of parchment from their homes to test his ingenuity when it comes to gaining access to buildings and offices. Once that has been done, she tells him to return the pilfered item either before the owner notices, or without the owner's notice if they know that it is gone. She almost expects Thorin to tell her to stop tormenting them, but whenever she is in the Council chambers listening in he merely arches an eyebrow at the complaining member and advises them to hire more guards or improve their security. Nori, wearing a heavy helmet that hides most of her face and with her beard loose and wild about her chin, usually has to tilt her head a little to hide her smile.
They do not only target the members of the Council, as much fun as it is, they also work on slipping into the homes and businesses of merchants and craftsmen. There is a skill crossover between spies and assassins when it comes to being able to get into a place unnoticed even after leaving and Kíli will need to perfect that skillset. Given that he seems to have spent a great deal of his adolescence sneaking out to practice his trade, and for his mother to have paid off the Guild three times before Nori got her hands on him he had to have been sneaking out far more than Dís realises, Kíli is naturally incredibly skilled at getting in and out of places that he should not be without being caught.
Nori's relationship with Dís does not improve much, not that she expects it to given what she knows of Dís from her previous life. The only thing that the pair of them had ever argued about in that life had been Kíli's trade and the fact that Dís refused to allow him to be trained. By the time he was of age she had managed to convince the boy that it was little more than a harmless pastime and to be trained would bring shame on his family. Kíli, in either life, has always sought the approval of those important to him and although in this life he seems to have gained the approbation of his uncle, brother and mentor, he still struggles with the fact that his mother resents his trade, no matter what it will bring them in the end.
Nori is not sure they will ever get to the bottom of why Dís is so against something that Thorin has embraced so completely. She suspects it has something to do with the princess' memories of her dead brother, but that is none of Nori's concern. Nori's concern is the way that Dís behaviour affects her son and it is most obvious to the thief when they return to the lad's home the evening after he has completed his spy test, three days after his sixty-seventh birthday, to announce that he has passed and can move on to the final phase of his training on schedule. He is eager to tell Thorin, his exuberance infectious as he talks his uncle through the two days that the test took.
The spy test is, by necessity, longer and more in depth than the test for thieves alone. In that role Kíli could be expected to follow and spy on a person for days or even weeks. The test, therefore, has to reflect a small amount of that. He had done well, only being spotted twice and confronted once, something he had handled with grace and ingenuity. Nori is incredibly proud of him and one look at Thorin's expression tells her that though the king does not understand all the intricacies of the test he is proud as well.
"You should tell your mother," Thorin says, pressing a hand to the back of Kíli's neck and touching his head to that of the younger dwarf. "If you have not already."
"Ma won't care," Kíli says and Nori sighs, this is not a new thing to hear from him. "She never does when I try to tell her things these days."
"Your mother cares," Thorin insists although he looks almost taken aback at the way the lad shrugs and averts his gaze.
"She's been angry since I started my training," Kíli says. "Or angrier. Especially since Fíli's coming of age."
"She's worried," his uncle disagrees. "And probably frightened of what this means for your future. I had thought this public distance between the two of you was part of how you hide your training and activities. I had no idea it had spilled into the home."
"It's what's always been there," Kíli replies. "When it's just me and her."
Which is wrong, Nori thinks, because she had watched Dís and Kíli in her last life when they had thought they were entirely alone and the princess had been a doting mother. Then again, by the time Nori had progressed to watching them in secret Kíli was of age and long convinced by his mother and uncle that he was entirely craftless.
"I'll speak with her," Thorin promises. "I worry you did not mention this to me before."
"Then she would have been angry with you as well," Kíli replies. "And I'm old enough to handle my own problems."
"You should never feel like you have to do that alone, lad," Nori tells him. He gives her a pointed look. "I've lived this," she reminds him, "I don't want to see you living the same thing."
"I'll handle it," Thorin reiterates. "It is perhaps time that it was pointed out to your mother that, no matter how far it is from her original vision, your trade will still allow you to protect your brother. Perhaps more than you would have been before."
A.N: My brain is fried. So fried. Maths revision is hard, fun in it's own way but hard. Especially when your brain refuses to work with certain parts it (looking at you NOT OR statements). I chose this. Why did I choose this?
Also, you may have noticed that I am skipping massive blocks of time. Why? Because I don't want this story to run to a thousand chapters and it's taken my the better part of nearly 60 chapters to cover fourish years.