"I am Morwinyon!" Morwinyon called, when the scouts for the clan asked from up in the trees. There were arrows trained on them - she could see the glints from the heads. "With me is Kili, my brother. We are Alia's folk, from two days north. We come with horses, and to pass through to Rivendell."

She did not add that they were expected. It did not matter - they would still be greeted with arrows. The clans were all wary these days.

"I know you, Morwinyon and Kili," one of the rangers in agreed, dropping to the ground. "Maybe you'll remember - we rode out for the north downs, though we never made it."

Morwinyon remembered the ride, but not the woman, at least not at first. They had ridden north and received orders to turn west, back towards Evendim. A pack of goblins had been stealthier than usual, and more rangers had been needed to track them down.

"Crandal!" Kíli exclaimed, dismounting to greet the woman with an arm clasp. Morwinyon copied him with a smile, remembering now - Crandal had badgered her about the probable origins of her name. Morwinyon had been ready to dunk her in the lake, but she had been a good person to have at her back anyway.

"You'll stay for a night?" Crandal asked. "Our lorekeeper would ask a few questions of you, Morwinyon, and our forgemaster has a question about a technique - and I am not clear on the details."

"A night only," she said, exchanging glances with Kili. "We journey with purpose."

"Don't we all?" Crandal asked, laughing, and led them to the main camp.

Kíli listened to his sister explain for the third time in as many hours to the third ranked member of the clan that she did not know this Aragorn son of Arathorn personally. She was beginning to lose patience, he could tell. Probably by the fifth request for her thoughts on Aragorn's character she'd snap and say something entertaining.

He was sure most of the clan leaders knew that Morwinyon was an elf, even if the common run of Dunedain accepted her as their own - it didn't make sense, that Alia had kept it from them, especially not with this request. Unfortunately it seemed to make them think she would know more than she did - as if all elves were old and wise. In fairness, he reflected, he'd thought so too, and Morwinyon did have white in her hair. It made people think she was older.

"But surely you have some insight," Beslan protested. The clan leader was male, which was a little unusual but not unheard of amongst Dunedain. Morwinyon had not batted an eyelash about talking to him before being properly introduced by his sister or wife or whatever, because she did not care. As a widow Kíli had noticed that the Dunedain gave her more leeway in things like that. Kíli never got that leeway - just because he considered himself promised didn't mean the Dunedain did. The lorekeeper for this clan had turned immediately to Morwinyon when he'd tried talking to her, a blatantly nervous expression on her face.

The expression had disappeared immediately when Morwinyon had formally introduced them, of course, but it was still irritating. Dwarves didn't have that kind of nonsense: if you wanted to talk to someone you did. The Dunedain put too much emphasis on gender, he felt personally, but then again he felt the same way about elves.

In the early days they had all wondered why Dis and Kíli had needed to be introduced by Morwinyon, and Morwinyon had been about to storm out of a gather in a high dudgeon, thinking the clan had not wanted to talk to dwarves. Eventually they had straightened that out - everyone had thought Dis was male - but Kíli still failed to understand why it mattered in the first place.

Still. The Dunedain had been good to them, and even better to Angion and Tauriel, and he was grateful. It didn't mean he didn't think they were weird.

"No more than do you," Morwinyon said, accent rolling out in a way that was rarer and rarer these days. It was why her Khuzdul always sounded just a little off, though Kíli would never tell her so. She couldn't quite manage some of the harsher sounds even if her vocabulary might be even more complete than Kili's own.

Kíli said, "We don't usually come this far south."

"He rode to the north," Beslan argued.

"But not with us," Kíli said before Morwinyon could, shrugging. "Maybe another clan would have more insight."

"No one seems to know anything about him," Beslan said. "It's almost like he sprung from nowhere."

"I am sure his mother bore him as our mothers bore the rest of us," Morwinyon said. "And his mother did ride with us for a time, or so Alia says, so her character is vouched for."

Perhaps Beslan heard the same bite in her tone as Kíli did, or maybe he had just talked himself out. The gathering ended with no more direct talk of Aragorn son of Arathorn.

"You can't say that of the twins, you know," Kíli told her as they went to the tent assigned them.

"Pardon?" Morwinyon asked.

"The twins," he said. "Their mother did not quite bear them as our mothers bore the rest of us."

She laughed, as he had intended, an said, "Well, if I hear that Aragorn was cut from his mother I will be more wary."

When they lay in the tent (its owner was one of the scouts who had greeted them, and was still patrolling), Morwinyon said, because she knew he liked to hear such things, "Tauriel would have slept outside. She hated not seeing the stars even when we were in my father's halls. My windowseat had the only real view of them, and we would sit there long into the night."

It was the same way he had learned that Tauriel had had no blood family left, and that she had liked apples and been terrible at card games and been raised to captain of the guard and scout leader too young, probably, but she had done the jobs anyway and been good at them.

"She raised me too young," Morwinyon had said once, when they were camping out, staring at the stars. "But then, she was good at that, too."

Now, he said without any real heat, "You've told me that already."

"Have I begun to repeat myself?"

"Sixty years. It's bound to happen sometime."

Morwinyon laughed, and said firmly, as she always did, "She loved you very much."

He didn't mind when she repeated herself, really.

Angion and Tauriel were freakishly well behaved for dwarvish infants. Kíli was beginning to think he'd have to take Drastic Measures, because it couldn't be natural. Their father might not have been the troublemaker that Kíli was, but he'd had a strong mischievous streak anyway and their mother had gotten fed up with being a literal princess locked away in a literal tower and run off to fight a literal dragon.

Being well-behaved was just not in their bloodline. Tauriel's namesake was no slouch in the rebellious department, either.

He often forgot all of that when he held them, though, because Tari liked to tug on his hair and Angion was a cuddler.

"We have to do something about this," he told his niece. He was holding both of them, but her twin had fallen asleep over Kili's shoulder almost the moment he'd been picked up. "The family reputation is at stake, you know."

Tauriel tried to push his face away and huffed in frustration when it went only so far.

"I suppose that's a start," he said.