The Whirlwind 10: Harry
Harry had read enough of Dale's history books, if the collections of tales could be called that, to understand what sort of threat a marching army of Orcs posed to Dale, Erebor and everyone in between. The books mentioned Orcs many times, but they explained very little, as if the viciousness of that race was one of the realities of life that did not warrant further examination. From this, and from many other similarly dogmatic claims she'd come across during her limited exposure to Middle-earth, she'd long concluded that the line between the good and the evil was rather precisely drawn in this world.
It was this seemingly perfect straightforwardness that did not sit quite right with her. After all, from her experience, things were rarely only black and white.
It was midnight before the day of the battle and Harry was haunted by questions that kept her awake even as the nervous activity in the city around her had finally ceased and people had taken to their beds under the imposed curfew.
The difficulty was to find anyone who would put those questions to rest. Few people in Dale had actually met any Orcs before they'd attacked their homes in Lake-town six days prior. And even if they had any knowledge of them, tomorrow was coming quickly and the imminent battle approached with it. The villagers were too scared to offer any objectivity.
The Elves would probably be a better source of information but Harry had decided early on to stay clear of them and their minds, unchartered waters as that whole race was for her right now. There would be time to get to know them, but it would be done with great care, not in a rush and the tension of an impending fight hanging over their heads.
Short on options, she found herself sitting by the fire with Bain, of all people, in the room they shared with two other families. On the cots behind their backs, their roommates breathed softly, resting in their fitful sleep. Sans Bard, of course, who had left for Lake-town after the negotiations with the Dwarves were finished, and had yet to return.
Bain, who still adopted a starry wide-eyed look every time he peered at her. Bain, who had trouble speaking in full sentences when she got near. She dearly hoped that further exposure would return things back to normal—he was a sweet boy.
For a moment, she wondered what kept him awake, but one look at his face and the way he kept worrying his lower lip gave her the rather obvious answer. "You and your sisters will be safe inside the Mountain," she offered in a soft whisper, mindful of the people asleep in the room. "The Dwarves fought hard to reclaim their home. They won't let it fall to Orcs so soon after."
Bain shot her a quick look from under his furrowed brows, before his eyes returned to the flames. It took him a long time to break the silence, but Harry was content to wait. "But Da will be out there, out on the front lines. He'd not allow himself anything less."
Harry suppressed the exasperated sigh that threatened to escape at the idiotic ideas she could see brewing in that boy's brain. "Let's make a deal—I'll be out here, watching your father's back, if you do the same for the girls inside the Mountain." She'd been planning to look after Bard, anyway.
Bain might be young and sweet but he wasn't stupid, and he saw right through her. "You just said there won't be any dangers in the Mountain."
Harry sent him an unimpressed glare. "Well, you still have to protect the girls from themselves. Tilda's fanciful enough to climb the walls back onto the battlefield and try to help."
He recoiled, in fright at the idea or in indignation Harry did not know. But it seemed she managed to get her point across. "I think I'd be of more use than Tilda," Bain grumbled.
Harry pretended to ponder the question before replying. "Nah, I can see you'd do about the same amount of damage. Your dad would certainly be equally terrified and distracted."
He shot her a frown and Harry was pleased to notice the annoyance seemed to have wiped out all of the previous awe from his eyes. Good. She imagined he could have been a good friend to her, once grown up. A pity that she wouldn't be here to witness it.
"Bain-" she started after enough time had passed in silence. "Are there any good Orcs?"
He lifted his eyes at her, confused. "Good Orcs?"
"Yes," she insisted. "Good Orcs. I understand the whole race was made evil and to spread evil, but according to the same tales of yours, the race of Men were created a decent folk. And yet, there are certainly many wicked Men. So, I wonder, would there be any decent Orcs, even if they were made wicked?"
Bain stared at her in incomprehension, for long enough that she lost hope he would have an answer for her. But then, he slowly intoned, "I've never heard of any good Orcs."
"Really? What about their females and children? Are they just born evil, or do they grow into it? And if they really only crave bloodshed and cruelty, who takes care of the babes?"
He squirmed in his seat, visibly unsettled. "What is the point of such questions?"
"I'm thinking that if they are any decent Orcs, more reasonable ones, then there would be a chance to- well, reason with them. Parley, maybe," she added, remembering the word Thranduil had spat in the tent a few hours earlier.
"Parley with Orcs? There's nothing they'd want that we would be willing to offer. They want our flesh, Harry, and they relish in the fight for it."
"But to what end? If they got their wish, they'd kill us all, and then where would that leave them? Don't you ever wonder there must be something else to it?"
"Such is the nature of evil," Bain said, shrugging his shoulders, and sounding way too sage for his age. "It aims to consume all. And the fell creatures are fueled by its purpose."
Harry let out a frustrated sigh, knowing they had just come full circle in the reasoning, a circle of this world's tales of creation that Harry wasn't entirely sure what to make of. It wasn't the most ridiculous theory she'd ever heard, there were several cultures and religions on Earth that would easily take that prize, but it baffled her how widespread and generally believed in—even across races and regions—that one tale was here, in Middle-earth.
She didn't ask any more questions and they waited in silence for Bard to return. Bain had dozed off in his chair in the next hour or so, but Harry's frantic thoughts didn't let her sleep, keeping her awake until the ink black sky behind the windows started fading.
How far would she allow herself to go, should she believe the Orcs purely evil? Would her conscience allow her to cross the lines she'd kept in place against any other enemy, be they desperate, misguided or even wholly corrupt, but still human? Was there any previous experience to compare this to? An army of Inferi? But surely not, though, for the Orcs were not just husks of a life ended, but living creatures-
Bard slipped into the room with only a muted creak of the door, shoulders hunched in exhaustion. When he noticed her still sitting by the fire, he frowned in disapproval but nodded his greeting. He crossed the room on light feet to the bowl of clean water Sigrid had left out for him. They'd known he'd push himself hard to get to Lake-town and back before the morning.
Knowing her face was well hidden in the shadows, Harry watched as Bard took off his jacket, tunic and shirt and quickly splashed the water over his sweaty back. Biting her lip, she saw goosebumps rising over the expanse of his skin, and quickly looked away.
Harry was well-aware she'd managed to develop a bit of a crush on Bard. No matter that she was well over a century old; in the matters of attraction, her body seemed to suddenly remember that it had not developed much past her maturity, and decided to deal with the hormones with the zeal of an eighteen-year-old.
The whole thing was made even more ridiculous by the fact that there was no quick solution to it this time. Bard currently thought of her as a wayward orphan—a boy, at that!—to protect. It was her biggest cause for regret of her choice of disguise. This wasn't the first time she considered revealing a bit more of the truth to him. But, Bard already treated her differently, and people had started to take notice. She wasn't yet confident in this world, not comfortable enough in her knowledge of it, to bring more attention to herself. Of any kind.
She was brought back to the present when Bard bent over Bain's crouching form. His upper body was now covered in a fresh shirt, she noted, relieved and disappointed at the same time. With a soft intake of breath, he picked up the almost fully grown boy and gently laid him down onto his cot, pulling a blanket over him. The boy didn't even stir.
When he sat down on Bain's emptied chair, she passed him the bowl of broth they'd kept warm for him over the fire. He nodded his thanks and eagerly started slurping it down.
"Lake-town won't send their folk into the Mountain," he said when the bowl was half-empty. "They'll burn the bridge and hope it'll stop an army as if it were just another group of bandits."
She reached over the distance between their chairs, squeezing his shoulder in response to the defeat she saw in his eyes. "You've done your best to protect them. The rest is their doing."
His head dropped even lower. "I dearly wish my best could be a good deal better."
Her heart beat in sympathy at the familiar despair, and she felt herself falling just a bit deeper.
Harry squinted her eyes at the pieces of armor someone had spread onto the cot next to hers. She suspected Sigrid and her tendency to think of everything.
Harry picked up the breastplate, absurdly heavy and rusty at the edges. She let out a scoff of derision and dropped it back onto the pile. Next, she untangled the clanky sword from her second belt, knowing it'd only get in her way. She had nicked a nice and short dagger from Dale's armory the other day. For appearance's sake, it'd be enough.
The rest of the room had been empty when she'd woken up. Exhausted, she must have slept through all of them leaving for the Mountain. The sun wasn't yet completely peaking over the Lake Hills, though—it wasn't that late.
She flung a locking spell at the door, just in case. From the packs underneath her cot, she took out one of her most valuable possessions—her sports bra she'd been wearing when she'd arrived into this world, the only one she had that wasn't in tatters now. She quickly changed. It didn't mask her chest as well as her usual bindings did, but with her baggy tunic and coat, it didn't matter much. She took a deep breath, relishing in the feeling of freedom as the elastic material spread willingly with the movement of her ribs. Elasticity, oh, how I miss thee!
A plate with breakfast was also waiting on the cot, also most probably thanks to Sigrid, and Harry quickly grabbed the bread and cheese into her hand, intending to munch on it on the way. Ready for the day and the battle that would come with it, she left their patched-up room.
Two houses down, she slipped into a narrow alley, and then into yet another abandoned building that she knew contained a conveniently closed-in courtyard. Safely out of sight, she swiftly turned into a falcon and shot up into the sky.
The city underneath her was brimming with the gold of the Elven soldiers, with only some greys and greens of the Men's coats mixed in. Women and children had walked out of the city by now; Harry could see the column of people spreading two thirds of the way to the Mountain. There, in front of the gates, a new horde of Dwarves in heavy armor milled about and- dug ditches? Well, good for them.
Satisfied to see that things were moving according to the plans, she turned her flight south-east and went to check on the progress of the Orcs.
A minute later, she'd just passed over the first peaks of the Lake Hills, when the stone beneath her groaned. She slowed down her flight, gliding in confused circles, looking for a possible cause for the thunders that were now ripping through the mountains underneath her.
From the west, back the way she came, a new sound reached her, a boom of explosion, drowning any other noises, until it was itself drowned in the next similar explosion, and then the next one. She counted six booms altogether before the sounds finally ceased, followed only by a few seconds of relative silence, before it was once again broken by distant roars of war horns. Harry angled her tail feathers and turned sharply to head back.
Something was terribly wrong.
It took her only a few seconds to reach back the peaks and regain the view of the valley that spread between two arms of the Lonely Mountain, and between its Gates and Dale. Dread filled her stomach at the scene below her—six columns of Orcs were spilling out of the ground, rushing down to the road at the bottom of the valley. And there, in the Orcs' way, a line of her neighbours spread out from one end of the vale to the other, unprotected.
Shrieks and screams of terror cut through the air as people started running. Only a small fraction rushed towards Erebor, the majority turned back to Dale, to the safety they knew, but which was also further away. They were painfully slow though, children, and elderly and mothers with babes in their arms, and seemed to be almost crawling when compared to the sprint of the dark hordes surging towards them.
Dwarves up at the Mountain gates started gathering and she could also see Elves rushing out of Dale. But they had a long way to run to offer protection, whilst the Orcs would be upon the road in half a minute.
This was her doing.
They'd acted on her intelligence, relying on her words that the Orcs were still a day away. If anyone dies, it'll be on her hands.
Well, they weren't dead yet.
Abandoning her caution and fears of attention, she welcomed the fierce serenity that always came to her in a fight, at last unhindered by the limits she'd let such fears impose on her. Half-formed plans flickered through her mind and got quickly discarded as she flew closer. She could overtake the Orcs and reach the fleeing people in time, but there was nothing at her current disposal that could help her effectively protect a column a mile or so wide from a charging army.
It would have to be offense, then.
Deciding on a plan, she broke her flight to land on the nearest outcropping, turning back into a witch still mid-air and landing softly on her feet. Searching the sea of Orcs for the right target, she snapped her wand out of its holster. There, he will do, she thought grimly, as her eyes landed on a mountain troll with massive blades instead of gauntlets, towering high above the Orcs around him and running close to the front of their lines.
The distance was much greater than what a regular spell could effectively fly, but the curse she had in mind was a persistent one, eager to find a victim no matter how far it had to travel for it. Harry's aim only needed to be true. For the first time in a long while, she grasped her wand firmly in her palm, raising its tip level to her eyes. Squinting, she took aim.
Imperio.
She felt the curse travel across the valley, she felt it hit true just a blink of an eye later and she felt her magic spread through the troll's mind like a heavy blanket, covering all his other thoughts. Harry immediately sent a command—surge forward!—only to feel the troll hesitate and the link between them tremble.
Her eyes widened in shock. A troll, a creature she read to be of very little intelligence and no strength of character, resisting an Unforgivable? She felt herself starting to panic—there was so much she didn't know about this world just yet, and so little time to alter her plans right now—and in response to her frantic thoughts, she felt her concentration slip, losing her hold on the troll almost entirely.
With her magic leaving the troll's mind, she got a glimpse of what filled it instead.
She recoiled in shock. There was a presence there, sinister, vile, strangely distant but still filling the troll with a purpose, and guiding it with absolute certainty of the creature's obedience.
She understood now. The troll was already under an influence. It was the magic that resisted her curse, not some mysterious characteristics of the creature. Magic, she could understand. Magic, she could combat.
She redoubled her effort, gritting down her teeth with concentration. She gathered all her determination into a sharp focus and sent it down the feeble link with the confidence that it would work, because it had in the past and it would again; and then barked her command with an authority expecting to obliterate anything standing in its way. Surge forward!
The troll did. He lengthened his strides, easily overtaking the Orcs around him, and crushing the unfortunate ones in his way. In a second, he was level with the very front of the Orc lines, of one of the six attacking columns. Under her commands, he turned back at the Orcs, spread his massive bladed gauntlets, and charged.
The first row of Orcs hadn't even paused in their tracks before they were slaughtered. The next dozen did freeze in their surprise, which was their own undoing as the troll halved them in one sweep. What's more, as Harry's troll rained carnage on the front lines, the rows behind them stopped in their assault, and slowed down a sixth of the charging tide.
Don't let any Orcs pass, Harry ordered at last and tentatively withdrew her concentration away from the curse. Her eyes stayed on the troll, though, watching whether he would hesitate again. But the foul presence seemed to have lost its hold over him, and only Harry's commands prevailed.
Satisfied, she turned her attention to find more trolls. She was quickly running out of time—although she'd stopped one tide, there were five more almost upon the bottom of the valley, and she knew a lone Imperiused troll wouldn't last long, anyway.
Luckily, there were many more targets. She raised her wand arm again and—knowing to expect resistance this time—sent her curse powering through the air with the force of her will at her most pig-headedness. It struck a troll with spiked balls on chains instead of arms. Whether there had been someone else controlling the troll before, Harry did not know—her curse obliterated anything else from the troll's mind before she could take notice.
In short succession, she flung curse after curse until she had a line of eleven trolls facing the oncoming hordes and stalling them with weapons and confusion both, with equal effect.
One of the trolls got overcome then, and she winced as he died and left her curse banging on a dead brain and absent mind. That wasn't pleasant, she thought with some irritation as a pang of pain throbbed through her temples before she managed to sever the link.
She shortly contemplated retreating most of her curses—the trolls were now fighting for their lives, and would continue to do so should she withdraw her influence. But, she knew it was the magic of the curse that endowed them with the skills needed to comply with her orders, lending a spur to their strength and agility they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Not willing to lose that advantage, she steeled herself against the possible headache, and left the curses in place. She went to find even more targets, trolls a bit further down the charging hordes, and sent her next curses at them, to further stall the onslaught.
During the course of her long life, she'd never wondered whether there was a limit to how many Imperius Curses a witch could hold at once, but it wasn't like it had ever been a concern before. She counted twenty-two trolls now before she had to stop, though not because of her control slipping, but because the Orcs finally got over their shock and her trolls started dying quickly. The combined effect left her head pounding.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the light, the morning sun piercing seemingly straight into her brain. The sudden migraine-like attack made her stomach churn violently, and she knelt quickly, expecting her breakfast to find its way up. She heaved several times, tasting the bile rise up in her throat. Still, she stubbornly held onto her spells.
A half a minute later, with the worst of the pounding in her skull fading, she finally forced her head up, to assess the situation.
Thirteen of her trolls still remained, standing in a line under her command, and half-successfully creating a wall of steel and muscle almost at the bottom of the vale. The Orcs were now spilling out over the sides, spreading further north towards Erebor, and south towards Dale. But they lost the direct way to their victims, as well as their velocity and their headstart. On the path between Dale and Erebor, the townspeople were now safe, either behind a wall of Elven soldiers retreating with them back behind the walls of the city, or up close to Erebor's gates, with a handful of Dwarves on goats intercepting the few Orcs on the townsfolk's tails that had escaped Harry's trolls.
Harry dropped back onto her heels, sacking with sheer relief.
She allowed herself a short moment of reprieve, three deep breaths to center her, before she opened her eyes with renewed determination. The battle had only started, after all.
With a critical eye, she cast her gaze over the battlefield, studying first the enemy's formation and then the allied forces' response. The Elves would all soon be back inside the city. The battlements and the army of archers standing upon them would halt the Orc charge.
The Dwarves, however, were out in the open and would feel the grunt of the assault in full. She could see them falling into close formations, their shields and spears ready for the oncoming onslaught, but that was only a part of them—some still ran behind their backs in disarray, helping the people of Dale up the ladders into the Mountain, mounting their goats and rearranging their rams for much closer range.
That made deciding on her next step easier. With the same mental command to all her remaining trolls, only ten now, she sent them hurling north, towards Erebor. Hopefully, they'd break up the charge in places, and give the Dwarves a reprieve in between the assaults. Her trolls wouldn't last long, already quite battered as they were. But unlike in a normal state, their numerous wounds didn't slow them down, the magic of the curse forcing them to comply above the best of their ability. They would still make a difference.
She spotted many more fresh trolls that had meanwhile emerged from the tunnels. Bracing for further migraine to come, she carefully aimed her wand to the closest Imperius-free troll to Erebor and fired her curse once again. She missed, hitting an Orc instead. Shrugging her shoulders, she gave him a quick command, and as he turned against his kin, she quickly withdrew before he was killed. Her second attempt hit true and she quickly moved onto the next troll.
And then, a voice reached her on her perch far up from the vale and everyone in it; an old, deep, familiar voice that carried as if the air was its messenger. "My lady," it seemed to greet her, tones full of awed reverence and gratitude. The message continued, but she didn't listen to hear the rest.
Instead, she strengthened her Occlumency, her mind doing the equivalent of locking and bolting gates and letting them disintegrate into iron steel walls. On the outside, she only felt her eyes widen, while inwardly, her mind froze in a complete stupor, as she breathed through her panic back into composure.
It didn't seem like an attack, she mused then. The message seemed just that—as someone greeting her in passing. But that's not how Legilimency worked back in her world—you couldn't just send a thought out into the open, expecting it to be picked up. You intruded into someone's mind to let them hear you inside. Hence, her initial panicked reaction. It had been many decades since someone managed to slip into her mind.
But she was in a different world, and she'd already concluded that magic indigenous to this place worked differently. She was almost sure the sender did not actually touch her mind, it was only his voice that did—if that made sense at all.
Even accepting that, there was still cause for worry. The person addressing her knew to send the thought out, expecting her to pick it up—he knew she had the magic for it. He also knew her to be a woman, and knew her to be kneeling here above the battleground. Unless the message was sent out wide? And maybe all beings in Middle-earth had the ability to pick up thoughts sent this way, not just magic users?
Her mind started swirling with further questions until she forcefully stopped the mental whirlwind. There was still battle ongoing and she still had the energy to prevent many unnecessary deaths. She'd deal with the repercussions later.
Returning her focus back onto the gates of Erebor, she wasn't surprised to see all her trolls lying dead. She had severed all her curses the moment she went into the mental lockdown in her panic, and the trolls must have fallen rather quickly without the boost of Imperius. Well. Hopefully, they'd still provided some distraction.
There weren't many trolls left alive on this side of the valley, but she still cursed them all. With that done, she turned her attention to Dale which was now truly under siege, surrounded not only by legions of Orcs, but also by trolls bearing rams and catapults on their backs.
Well, thank you.
She made them turn around and, with an agility that the trolls surely did not possess on their own, had them reach back and release the boulders into the masses of Orcs. As the projectiles cleared out long corridors, she commanded the trolls to run along them, then further through the enemy lines and up towards Erebor, to help the Dwarves. Most didn't get far, but that didn't matter much.
She no longer had the fortitude to withstand their deaths, shaking all over from dizziness, and she needed her hand steady to aim. Ruthlessly, she gave them command or two that would have them enraging their ex-fellow soldiers, and give them their free will back only to fight for their deaths. That caused enough havoc, and, more importantly, took the most formidable soldiers out of the enemy's ranks.
At one point, she cast her eyes around and realised there were no more trolls to curse. The tunnels were no longer spitting out Orcs. The Dwarves were now charging ahead, piercing the remaining enemy lines in sharp formations. She could see a small host of Dwarves on goats climbing up the hill opposite from her perch, presumably chasing after the Orcs who had been bellowing their horns in commands throughout the whole ordeal up until a moment ago.
Down in Dale, the Orcs had given up charging its walls. They broke formation, fleeing in disarray towards the lake. She spared one thought for Lake-town, but quickly snapped her full attention back to Dale when she noticed the bridge was brimming with Orcs and the gates were hanging loose on their hinges. The Orcs had broken through, after all.
Remembering her promise to Bain, her concern for Bard spiked, and she had the sudden urge to go check on him. She stopped herself, casting one more look over the battlefield, making sure she was not needed anywhere else more urgently. But even her tactical mind confirmed this perch had outlived its purpose.
Turning into a peregrine, she glided down to the city on still wobbly wings.
A/N:
After a chapter like this, there's a perfect story that comes to mind:
One Woman Army by AutumnSouls
It's a very strong one-shot, also featuring a fem!Harry facing an Orc army. A truly satisfying read, so satisfying actually, that it managed to entirely grab me even back when I was still opposed to the idea of fem! stories; and led me onto the path of discovery. AutumnSouls has another fem!Harry crossover, To Rekindle the Flame, which I have high hopes for, although it's still in its infancy.
.
(I'd like to give something back to the authors that have directly or indirectly inspired me in my own writing. At the end of my chapters, I'll be mentioning stories that I'm more than happy to recommend for your further reading)
