Chapter Ten: Bluebell
T.A. 2903 The Shire
"Bungo, please be reasonable about this!" The sound of her mother's exasperated voice pulls Bluebell from the book she has been struggling to read in the parlour. Her parents are in the kitchen and although Bluebell can't see them through the blankets that have been nailed across the door (and the windows) to help keep the heat in, she can hear them well enough. Winter has already been far longer than it should have been, starting earlier and harsher than ever. Food and other supplies are low, and the Baggins family have taken to huddling in the parlour at night for warmth. The kitchen is the only other room in the smial that currently has a source of heat and the stove is only lit for the two meals a day that they have restricted themselves to. A restriction that her mother insisted on early on and that her father still objects to strenuously.
"You think I'm being unreasonable?" Her father snaps. "Belladonna, every time something happens the first thing you think of is writing to that bloody dwarf! We don't need help. Especially not from him."
"The Brandywine is frozen," her mother replies. Bluebell sets her book aside and moves closer so that she can listen. "Wolves will be the least of our problems if it stays that way much longer. Something is coming, something terrible. The earth is asleep and it's still screaming at me."
"Yavanna's tits!" Bluebell muffles a gasp at the snarled curse, a phrase she never thought to hear her staid father use. "You can't possibly know that and I'm not discussing this with you again, I'm not having this anymore. I can't compete against your past for the rest of my life and I'm tired of fighting it. I refuse to fight for your heart anymore when I don't think I really had it in the first place. You want your dwarf? Fine. Go to him as soon as the thaw comes."
"Bungo?" Her mother's voice is as stunned and shattered as Bluebell's heart. "You can't- You don't-"
"I can and I do. I release you of our vows," her father's voice is resigned, now, lacking the anger of his original declaration. "I should have done it years ago."
The relationship between her parents has been tense and fractured for a while. Bluebell would have to be blind not to have seen it. This winter and the lack of food has brought it into sharp relief. The cracks that have always been there have become wider, especially since Uncle Frerin's last visit nine years before. The rumours she's been hearing all her life have some truth to them and Bluebell is furious at both of her parents. Furious with her mother for marrying her father in the first place and furious with her father for choosing now, of all times, to finally realise that Belladonna was never truly his. Her world is collapsing around her. What her father is doing will utterly destroy her mother's place in the Shire and materially damage Bluebell's prospects for the future.
"I'm taking some food," her father's voice filters through and she realises that her mother is crying. "I'll be staying with my brother and his wife until the thaw. After that you go to your dwarf."
"Bungo, please," her mother begs.
"No, Belladonna," he's firm. "You will leave, and you will not see my daughter again as long as I am alive to prevent it."
Bluebell stifles a sob, it is the way of things and although the breakdown of a marriage is rare when it does happen the father keeps the home and the child. The mother is sent back to the home of her parents in disgrace.
Then her mother is in front of her and Bluebells falls into her arms with a broken cry. In that moment she hates them all. She hates her father for ripping her life out from under her. She hates her mother for not loving her father enough to forget about Frerin and she hates the dwarf for not telling his family that he was marrying the woman he loved regardless of the consequences. Her mother's arms are not a comfort and she shoves away, running to her freezing bedroom and barricading herself inside. She burrows under as many blankets as she can find, then lets her heartbreak fill the room. Vaguely she hears the front door open and her mother pleading with her father not to leave. She presses the pillow tighter over her head so that she doesn't have to hear her father finish reminding her mother that she was never really his. She's starting to tingle, though, and her mother's voice is getting louder and more frantic. Her feet itch and her arms ache and she finds herself drawn from her bed into the world outside. The door is still open and Bluebell can hear screaming as she runs out of it and down the garden path.
Her father's blood stains the snow and his eyes stare, unseeing, at the sky. Bluebell feels her chest go tight as her own cries of anguish are torn from her throat. For a moment all it is all she can see and then her eyes turn down the path, expecting to find her mother in the same condition. She finds her mother, but Belladonna is surrounded by corpses and her eyes, normally a vibrant indigo, are nearly black. The final orc that must have been responsible for the attack collapses in front of her, soundless and unmoving. It takes little more than a flicker of will to touch the Blessing, to look upon her mother's life light and that of the orc, to see the way that Belladonna is using her Blessing to rip the life out of the orc and how the shades of her light mixes and is nearly overwhelmed by the black that belongs to that of the massive creature.
Once the orc is dead her mother turns to her. Belladonna's face is scrunched in a vicious snarl and Bluebell backs away, terrified. There is nothing of her mother in this creature. Belladonna means to kill her too, Bluebell realises, this is what a hobbit becomes when they abuse the Blessing and what her mother always warned her about. She skitters backwards, stumbling on the steps and waiting for that final, fatal, twist of her mother's will. Then Belladonna's foot makes contact with the cold pool of Bungo's blood and the darkness drains out of her.
Her mother collapses at her feet and Bluebell can do nothing but scream.
T.A. 2941 The Trollshaws.
When hearing about her mother's adventures, Bluebell muses as she watches Belladonna and Bombur prepare dinner, she had never heard about the long days where the only thing that happened was walking or riding. The misery of soaking clothes after days of rain with no shelter other than the sparsely leaf coated trees, too cool nights where the only choice is to huddle close to the nearest warm body regardless of the fact that no one has washed for a week or more and the resulting smell was becoming vaguely offensive to a sensible hobbit nose. No one spoke about the ache from riding or the debilitating nausea it causes hobbits until they become accustomed to it. No one said about the monotony of the same trail rations cooked every evening unless someone had been able to catch some fresh meat.
"A dull journey is the best sort," her Adad explains when she complains to him. Ori has been commandeered by Dori, and Fili and Kili have been sent to watch the ponies. They agree with her, though. "The exciting parts are all well and good in stories, but they aren't when they're happening. Mostly they're just terrifying and carry too much risk of friends dying."
"Personally, I could use something to get my blood moving," Dwalin grumbles and Frerin chuckles.
"I'm just as glad it's been quiet so far," Balin replies, "there's plenty of time and distance for that to change yet."
Dwalin grunts but Bluebell knows that the most likely time for trouble will be when they come to cross the Misty Mountains. That was always where her mother found trouble in her stories. She wishes she could see Rivendell but Thorin seems adamant that they won't be going there. She has had to content herself with the thought that maybe they will go there on their way back to the Shire. If they go back to the Shire. Her mother is more alive here in the wild than she has been since the day that Bungo died. The orc memories trouble her less, even the few times that they've heard their calls from a distance at night. It's all the evidence that Bluebell has ever needed that, perhaps, the Shire was never the best place for Belladonna.
Of course, she thinks as she happily leans against her Adad, the people who tell the stories of great adventures got one thing right. These dwarves are slowly becoming her closest friends. Weeks on the road together has pushed them all to get to know one another, although the friendliness of the group had been stilted at first (and she rather suspects that if not for the presence of Frerin it would have continued to be so). The hobbits are outsiders, tolerated because they will be of use and accepted because Frerin has made it very clear that Bluebell and her mother are the two most important beings in the world to him.
She's closer to some, Fili, Kili and Ori, than others. Dwalin is intimidating no matter what Frerin says and Nori's sharp eyes watch her with a kind of cool calculation that she finds unnerving. Oin and Gloin keep away from both hobbits and neither of the smaller creatures can hold a conversation with Bifur without someone to interpret. They need to do something about that axe, she thinks, she and her mother have spoken about it but neither of them knows how to broach the subject and they might not be able to do help much in any case. Oin certainly thinks it would be too dangerous to do anything about it and the damage could be permanent anyway with how long the axe has been there.
"Here, lass," Bofur smiles kindly down at her holding two bowls, "take these to the lads, will you?" She does it without argument, concern for the missing wizard is starting to coil in her gut and the soles of her feet are tingling as she draws nearer to the ponies and her friends. She has felt this a handful of times in the past and it scares her. It never happens unless something bad is coming, some danger that she hasn't seen yet.
Neither of the princes greet her when she calls to them, they merely stare at the ponies with perplexed frowns.
"How did you manage to lose two ponies?" She demands when they finally explain. "What were you doing?"
The tingling in her soles is getting worse and the sight of trees that have been torn from the ground is not remotely reassuring. If the sensation is this strong in Bluebell her mother will be feeling it too. Doubtless Belladonna and Frerin, who knows to heed the warnings, will be with them shortly. The trail of destruction isn't hard to follow and even though she knows it's a monumentally bad idea she follows the two lads as they stumble through a reply that is a whole lot of nothing. Given what she has occasionally caught some of her cousins doing, quite by accident, she isn't actually sure she wants to know the truth. She glares them silently instead and a good thing, too, because a troll stumps past moments later with two more of the ponies tucked under its arms.
"That's it," she snaps softly as they continue to follow it, "we're telling Thorin." The princes protest, Thorin is in a bad mood, this will just make it worse and they will bare the brunt of it. Her raised eyebrow is less than sympathetic. Physically they're older and stronger than she is, and their lives have been more difficult in some respect than hers, but sometimes they behave like faunts. She's fond of them both, and she ignores the little part of her brain that points out that she's rather more than fond of one of them, but she isn't going to let them avoid the fact that this is the result of them not paying attention.
"What are you three doing?" Her Adad's voice startles all of them.
"These two geniuses lost four of the ponies," Bluebell hisses, "they somehow managed to miss a troll strolling by the camp." Frerin's look is speculative and he glances down at Belladonna, who apparently wanted to see what had put her on edge.
"Alright," Frerin sighs as they ease further in the direction that the troll went, now able to hear the rumbles of a conversation.
They follow the sound, veering from the path of destruction so that they are hidden by the undergrowth, and finally come across a camp. There are three trolls gathered around a fire, the ponies in a pen near the tree line which would probably give them enough cover to free the beasts if it could be managed without the trolls noticing the loss of their dinner.
"Fili, Kili, go back and tell Thorin what's happening," Frerin orders and Fili looks like he's about to object. Bluebell hasn't missed the way the older prince avoids interacting with his uncle where possible, it's going to cause problems sooner or later. Kili just snags his brother's sleeve and nods, helping himself to a bowl of stew that Bluebell had forgotten she was still carrying as he walks by.
"What's your plan, love?" Belladonna asks, eyes taking on an indigo glow as she connects to the earth beneath her feet. "I'm not sure fourteen dwarves can handle three fully grown mountain trolls."
"No," he agrees, "but they are susceptible to daylight, remember?"
"Dawn is a long way off," Belladonna points out.
"I don't exactly want these three behind us," Frerin replies. "Nor will Thorin. Once we take the ponies back, they'll be after us. Honestly, I'm glad the boys weren't there when the first two were taken. They'd probably already be in that pot if they had been and us none the wiser."
"I saw a patch of wolfsbane not far back," Bluebell offers. It will take a lot of it to poison a troll, but it might incapacitate them enough to stop them from following, possibly even enough to get them caught by the rising sun. The only downside would be the foul taste which could stop them from consuming enough to have any affect. Then the topic of squirrel dung seasoning comes up and Bluebell realises that the taste of it likely won't be a problem.
"I'll handle it," Belladonna says as she pulls a pair of soft leather gloves from her pocket. She wears them while riding and they had intended on getting Bluebell a pair but hadn't been able to find any small enough. "These will have to be burnt after," she sighs, "but with a little encouragement I should be able to gather enough to hurt them. Bluebell, dear, will you handle the prayer?" Her daughter nods.
"You'll need a boost to reach the pot," Frerin points out, also pulling out his own gloves.
"Make it the clan prayer, sweetling," Belladonna instructs, "just in case our other companions come blundering in."
This is far more casual than Bluebell could ever have imagined such an encounter being. Her mother and Frerin are falling back on patterns and actions established by their many decades of travelling together. Their intimate understanding of one another is so obvious in that moment that by the time Bluebell has fully processed it her mother has already returned with a tied petticoat full of the flowers, leaves and roots of the plant in question. She nods to her daughter and Bluebell begins to whisper.
"Green Mother, hear our prayer. Let us defend ourselves from this danger to our clan. Let us move with swift, silent feet, unseen on this land."
She has never done this for more than herself, when reciting the rhyme at her mother's insistence, and so she's surprised when a ripple of blue light sweeps over her mother and Adad to rest in their eyes. It's an indigo aura that is lost in Belladonna, but it circles Frerin's rich, brown irises eerily. Her mother smiles at her and that is all the encouragement that Bluebell needs to continue with her whispered chant.
The couple are quick, although still not quick enough for Bluebell's tastes and they are already on their way back when Bluebell feels a hand fall on her shoulder and hears the muted whispers of the rest of the Company. She turns and presses a finger to her lips, lips that are still moving with the words of the rhyme, and she can see the faint indigo ring around their irises as clearly as they must see the bright shine of her own.
"What foul sorcery is this?" Thorin demands harshly.
Bluebell shakes her head as she continues her frantic whispering. She can't stop, not now, not until her mother and Frerin are at her side. She dare not stop just in case a troll turns and notices them. There's little point in trying to poison the creatures only to end up in the pot anyway.
"Thorin, stop," Fili wrenches her from the other dwarf's bruising grip. Her continuing whispers falter as she finds herself wrapped tightly in his arms and she stumbles over the words. For a horrible moment she fears the prayer will dissipate and she races through another recital, relieved to see the glow as strong as ever in the eyes of those watching them.
"It's a hobbit thing, Uncle," Kili continues. "Like Fili's Stone Sense." That sparks her interest, Frerin has mentioned the Stone Sense a few times but she had no idea that Fili carried this ancient power of his people in the same way that she does hers.
"Frerin mentioned something," Thorin replies and takes a step back. "He hasn't seen fit to elaborate."
"Because it isn't my secret to explain," Frerin's voice comes from behind her and Bluebell stops her chanting. The indigo fades from the eyes of those around them and she sags against Fili a little as a sudden wave of exhaustion hits her. His grip on her tightens, as though he's afraid she will fall, and she should push him away, this isn't proper, but she's too tired. She snuggles closer instead, taking a moment to enjoy the warmth and strength of him.
"Perhaps it should be explained now," Thorin snarls, his tone making it abundantly clear that he doesn't trust the hobbit members of the party no matter who has vouched for them.
There is a moment of silence.
"I will not explain a secret gift from our Maker, not unless you deign to explain one from yours," Belladonna replies firmly. She reaches to take her daughter from Fili, who still holds her as though shielding her from his uncle, and both are surprised when they protest the separation. "And not now. When this has been dealt with and we've all had some sleep, we can discuss it like rational adults." Frerin makes a strangled noise behind her. Bluebell half expects Thorin to protest and can see from the way that his nephews and brother are watching him that they expect it as well.
Fortunately, the discussion is cut short by a howl of agony and a flood of the most vile stench Bluebell has ever encountered. Even the dwarves gag a little. Frerin disappears for a short time and when he returns he looks a little bit green, if a touch smug for it.
"We can get our ponies back now," he smirks. "And I think we over did it, Kurdel."