Disclaimer: I don't own The Hobbit!

A/N: *happy dancing and freaking out* Thank you THANK YOU for all the kind, awesome, wonderful, muse-giving reviews, everyone! I appreciate each and every ooooonneeee! Seriously, y'all, I cannot believe all the happy reviews, they make me bouncy. ^_^ So sorry that this chapter is uber late, grad school started back and it's trying to killlll meeee. BUT I WILL PREVAIL. So here is a prevailing chapter!

Like Everything That's Green

Chapter 4

Yawning, Camy rubbed the grit of sleep from her eyes as she got up from her makeshift pallet by the fire. After stretching, she pulled the dark blue overdress she had worn yesterday over her chemise and shuffle into the kitchen. The cottage only had three rooms; the main room where the den and the kitchen were, her bedroom and Mim's room, which also served as the woman's workroom. However, her work was actually spread all over the cottage, and herbs hung on walls and the ceiling through the little wooden home.

Last night had been the first real full night's sleep she had gotten since she had brought the dwarves to the cottage, what with needing to sit up with them and change bandages and fight fevers and mix new herbs and whatnot. Now that they both seemed to be on the mend, Mim had ordered her to bed as soon as dusk had fallen. Still, she felt like she could've slept 'til the afternoon and enjoyed a dozen more dreams, but years of being an early riser kept her from staying in bed half the day.

There was a kettle on the cast iron stove, and a hobbit-size teacup set out beside it. Pausing by the kitchen table, she could hear the muffled creak of Mim's rocking chair moving against the old boards of the front porch. Mim had probably already been up since before the sun rose; Camy couldn't remember a time when she had woken up in the morning before Mim.

Skirting around the table, she went over and opened the door to her own bedroom as quietly as she could. The little room had been forfeited when she had brought the dwarves into the home since they were Camy's responsibility, as Mim said. Oh, well, the little pallet she had made for herself by the fireplace wasn't so bad.

Both Fili and Kili were lumps beneath the quilts and covers, and the steady, loud, even snores told her that both of them were still peacefully asleep. She tilted her head a bit and wrinkled her nose. Truly, how did they make so much noise when they were merely sleeping?

Satisfied that they were both fine for the moment and unwilling to bother them, she closed the door and went to make herself a cup of tea. Sugar, mint extract, honey… Camy looked forlornly at the bottom of their honey pot when she lifted the lid. They seemed to out, which made sense, she supposed.

The first night and most of the first full day that they had had the dwarves at the home, they had both been unconscious, and Mim had made mixtures to dribble into their mouths that had been made of honey, water, feverfew and blueberry juice. Most of the honey had been used for those concoctions. The evening of the first day, Kili had woken up and been absolutely ravenous. Mim, however, would only let him have a few things, telling him quite plainly that he wasn't to eat himself sick. Honey had been the one sweet thing he had been allowed, and he reveled in that small luxury and seemed very determined to abuse the treat each day after.

Yesterday morning, Mim had come close to boxing his ears when she found him with his one good hand stuck tight in the little pot; she had settled for instead giving him a lecture on the negative qualities of having an overactive sweet tooth before she let Camy help him get the jar off.

Resigning herself to surviving without honey, Camy took her tea and slipped out the front door, taking a deep breath of the wet, cool air. Birdsong resounded through the trees, and the morning sun casted a pale glow over the untamed herbs and flowers of the vale. Dew glinted merrily on the overgrown grass in the yard. By his thatch lean-to, Bert was idly munching at a bale of hay, looking overly content and lazy.

"I trust you slept well, little one."

Camy smiled as she walked over to Mim's rocking chair. "Yes, ma'am," she said. She bit her lip. "You didn't need me during the night, did you? You should've woke me…"

"Trust me, I would have woken you if there had been any trouble with your dwarves," Mim said, shaking her head, "They're your problem, not mine." She lifted her cup to her lips and took a sip before glancing over the edge at Camy. "But now that they're on the mend, I doubt we'll have many troubles with them, at least in the sense of healing."

"Are dwarves really that hardy?" Camy asked. It was hard for her to believe that Fili and Kili, both of whom had seemed to be meeting with death when she found them, could return to health so quickly.

"I told you, they're as tough as granite and heal faster than the other races of the world. Did you not believe me?" Mim reached over and tugged at one of Camy's curls, wearing a small, sad smile. "Sometimes I forget how little you know." She set the teacup on her knee and held in between her wrinkled palms. "I should have done a better job of teaching you."

"I do know a lot though, so don't be hard on yourself!"Camy declared, reaching out to put her hand over one of Mim's. "I've read lots of books, and you're taught me so much."

"You know book learning and herb lore, child," Mim said, "You know the ground and the plants that grow from it and what they're for. Your world has always been a gentle place." She looked at the door to their cottage. The lines in her face deepened as she frowned, making her look older than her years. "Was it wrong that I only wanted happiness for you…"

"I am happy, really, I am," Camy said, patting Mim's hand. "Are you all right?"

The old woman turned back toward her with her normal wry smile back in place. "Yes, I'm fine." She pulled her hand out from under Camy's and motioned to her tea cup. "Drink that before it gets cold."

"Yes, ma'am," Camy said, though she wasn't entirely convinced that Mim seemed to be over her momentary displeasure. But she obediently sat down on the first step of the porch stairs and sipped at her tea. It just wasn't the same without her usual dollop of honey. "Do you mind if I visit the bees today, Mim? We're out of honey."

"I noticed," Mim said with another dark glance toward the door, "You can go in a day or so. Being without it in easy reach will teach the imp to keep his paw out of the pot." She sipped at her tea and glanced up at the mountaintops. "Eru help his poor mother. I can only imagine the terror he'll be when he gets the use of both hands, and now with the hairy one awake..." Mim grimaced. "Nothing edible in our house will be safe. You watch, if we're not careful and forget to provide enough food, they might start gnawing the leather."

Camy covered a giggle with her free hand. Mim's tone was just so long-suffering, it made her laugh. "That's hardly fair. They're dwarves, not puppies."

"I'm only mentioning it so that you'll know what happened if we find bite marks on the furniture."

Camy couldn't keep in her laughter. "Mim!"

For a while, they sat in companionable silence on the porch, finishing their morning tea and watching the vale awaken around them. A rabbit sat nibbling fresh green shoots of grass underneath an azalea bush, and there was more than a little chittering back and forth from the pair of squirrels who lived in the tall pine right beside the cottage. Noisy, cute buggers.

The door creaked open behind then, and Camy looked back over her shoulder and smiled. Kili, or "the imp" as Mim often referred to him, was standing in the doorway, yawning. This was the fourth day the dwarves had been there, not including the day she had found them in the forest, and she was ferociously curious about the two of them. Kili hadn't been very forthcoming with details about why he and his brother had been found half-dead in the forest; he had just said they were trying to visit their relatives in the east with a company of their kin and had gotten separated after they were captured by goblins.

"Mornin'!" Kili said, sounding chipper though he was rubbing his face as if to rid it of sleep. "There isn't any more tea left, is there? Maybe some sausages? Or ham?" His eyes lit up. "Bacon?"

"How about a whole hog?" Mim said dryly.

Kili's smile was brimming with wickedness. "Aye, we'll take that too if you've got it."

Mim looked over at Camy with an I-told-you-so expression, but Camy didn't think they were going to need to protect the furniture anytime soon. Of course Kili was hungry, most people were in the morning, and he was recovering from injuries. If anything she had read in her books and learned from Mim was true, hurt people who were getting better were hungry people. "I think there's some tea left in the kettle on the stove, and I'll make some breakfast."

"And you can help, dwarfling," Mim said as she stood up. As she walked toward the cottage, she stopped by the door and looked down at Kili. "If you're healthy enough to get around as well as you do, then you can help cook."

"Fine by me," he said with a smirk, "But I won't be held accountable for any mistakes in the kitchen. I'm an amateur cook. And I've got this bum arm." He waved his sling-encased arm around haphazardly and then gave the appendage a fierce glare, like it was its own fault for breaking. It wasn't too bad of a break; Mim had called it a fracture and said he would recover from it quickly enough if he let it rest. Unfortunately, Kili didn't seem like the resting type.

"Amateur cook? That would involve actually trying to cook something previously." Mim scoffed as she brushed past the dwarf and headed inside, probably to start work with the herbs. "I doubt you've ever cooked anything in your life."

Kili tossed a glare after her. "Lies! I've roasted many a rabbit, thank you."

Camy shook her head, not really understanding why Mim liked to tease and taunt Kili so much. She expected that it was actually Mim's way of keeping the dwarf at a distance; Mim didn't like anyone being too close, she knew that well enough.

"We don't have any rabbits to roast right now," Camy said as they followed Mim inside. "But I'm sure you can help fix biscuits." Somehow, even though he was shorter than Mim himself, he still made Camy feel small when she stood beside him. She was a few inches shorter than his shoulder, but he had said he was tall for a dwarf.

"I wouldn't trust him with biscuits," said a slightly deeper voice said. She looked over to find the blond dwarf, Fili, sitting with his elbows on the small kitchen table, watching them. Today, he had his washed and mended hooded tunic on and it looked like he had rebraided his hair; he looked far better than the day before, when he had been stumbling around the bedroom and getting drenched with soup. A grin tugged the corner of his mouth up on the side that didn't have the whip wound. "Might better give him something easier. Like boiling water."

"I can make biscuits!" Kili declared, tossing a determined grin at his brother, "I'll make gobs of biscuits, and I won't burn a single one." He walked over and flung open one of the cabinets as if the ingredients for making biscuits would just jump into his arms. Camy shook her head. Dwarves were odd folk.

Fili snorted. "That'd be a miracle, little brother."

"Three words. Taller. Than. You."

"One word. Beard."

"Good morning!" Camy said brightly to Fili, cutting off what might've been a brewing bickering match as she grabbed her stepstool to check the cabinets. "Do you want to help with breakfast, too?"

He quirked an eyebrow and glanced around the kitchen before looking back at her. "I can try. What do you want me to make?"

"Well…" Hmm, it couldn't be anything that he had to do standing up. He had his injured ankle, and he needed to keep his weight off it, or so Mim said, and he didn't have a crutch. Speaking of which… Camy stopped digging through the cabinet. "Actually, can you whittle?"

Fili and Kili glanced at each other before Fili nodded. "Aye…what would you want me to whittle? Bowls?"

Camy shook her head, grinning even as her cheeks heated up. "Oh, no, no, we have bowls enough, I believe." She pulled the pepper and salt shakers down from the cabinet and set them on the polished wood countertop. "But I was thinking you might want to get around at some point, and you don't need to be stomping about with your ankle the way it is. So if you could whittle your own crutch—"

Kili pushed away from the cupboard. "I'll do it! And I'll get the wood!" He bolted out the front door, letting it bang shut behind him.

Camy glanced back over her shoulder at Fili, who looked was smirking and shaking his head. "Is he always like that?"

"Worse. He has the attention span of a squirrel in acorn season." The dwarf picked up a table mat that was lying on the table and played with one corner of it. "I'd hoped I might get a crutch…Kili told me my ankle was sprained." He glanced over at the door that his brother had recently run through. "He said we were both bad off, but he wouldn't give me any details." There was something expectant about the way he was looking at her that made her think that her feel like he expected her to fill in those details. Unfortunately.

Camy's hands stilled for a moment around the piece of pottery she was grabbing and then she pulled it out of the cabinet. Turning around, she lowered herself to the counter and sat down, the bowl in her lap. "It wasn't…He was really very worried about you, you know, he barely left your side. Maybe he just doesn't want to talk about it."

"He should be able to talk to me about anything." He lifted his head and gave a humorless half-smile. "Especially when it's about me."

"You were both badly hurt," Camy said, shaking her head. She ran her finger around the cool edge of the bowl and sighed. "Kili's arm is fractured, and he did have a concussion, but it's better now. He lost a lot of blood during that fight you were in. And you were—" Slowly, she looked up to find him watching her, his face pale and drawn. Camy bit her lip and tightened her grip on the sides of the bowl. "Do you really want to hear this?"

"Yes…please."

Camy sucked in a breath through her teeth. "Your ribs are bruised, your ankle is sprained horribly, and you were whipped at some point, or that's what Mim says. And you both had more bruises than anyone is entitled to, and multiple sword and knife wounds. I, I couldn't count them all." It was odd to think that now she knew exactly what a jagged knife could do to flesh, the bloody trail that a sword left behind, the lick of a whip on skin. Before this she had only known how to heal two-legged folk in theory, since most of her practice had been with forest animals. "I'm just glad you're both doing much better."

"Thank you," Fili said after a few quiet moments had passed, "For taking care of my brother and myself." He gave her a small smile. "I doubt we would have survived if it hadn't been for you."

"It was Mim, really," she replied, "I truly am just in training, honest."

Fili leaned back in his chair and looked at her steadily. "But you're the one who found us in the woods and brought us here, right?" He smirked. "I distinctly remember a hobbit and not a human in the woods."

"We do look a tad different, don't we?"

Fili chuckled. "Just a little."

Camy looked down at her feet and wrapped her hands into her dress. "I only did what was right."

"That still deserves a thank you."

"Then you're welcome," she said, glancing up and smiling a little.

Fili smiled back and then spread his hands open on the table. "And I really am sorry about the sword and scaring you like that. I wasn't in my right mind."

"Don't worry!" Camy shook her head. "I might've done the same thing if I'd just been near-killed by goblins and knew how to use a sword." She climbed down from the counter. He didn't need to apologize to her anymore, she really didn't blame him. "As it happens, I've never been in that situation."

He suddenly sat up straighter and looked around. "This place is in the mountains, isn't it?"

"Well, yes, we're in the range, why?"

Fili's eyebrows rose, and he braced his arms as if he was about to get up. "Is my brother in danger?"

Camy waved her hands in the air rapidly. "Oh, no, no, we told him about the gate, he'll be fine!" She walked into the small pantry and started pulling out the sausage links and the fixings for the biscuits. "There aren't any goblins here, I promise."

"A gate?" He didn't sound like he believed her about the gate. She probably wasn't explaining it very well; she had never had to tell anyone about the vale or the gate before. It was sort of difficult to explain such things, now that it came to it. "A gate to what? And why don't they climb over this gate or just take it down? It can't be that formidable."

"Well, they can't because it's a magic gate,"Camy answered, raising her voice so he could hear her clearly from the table. Her fingers darted among the pots and containers of the pantry shelves. "It's the Living Gate. And they can't see it. Well, no one can see it, or, no, wait, they can, but it looks like a rock wall from the outside. And it's the gate to the vale, which is here." Ooo, peppercorn, they'd need that, and where were the chives? Maybe she would make omelets with sausage in them, they couldn't object to that now could they? "This cottage right here is in the vale, which is in the mountains, which have goblins in them, but the vale doesn't have any goblins in it because of the gate." Mmm, she wished there was honey for the biscuits. Oh well. She'd have to convince Mim to let her go visit the bees sooner rather than later. "We do have a donkey though, and lots of plants, and Mim and me." Oh, she hoped that had all made sense! Camy poked her head out of the pantry door to find Fili rubbing his forehead as if he had a headache.

"I don't understand," he said, "How is there a magic gate in the first place?"

"That's not for her to tell," Mim's voice interrupted their conversation. Camy winced a little at Mim's stern tone as she set the breakfast ingredients on the table. The woman moved away from the doorway to her room and came to the table, her eyes on Fili. "And I think you owe us some honest answers before we discuss our home any further."

Camy could see Fili tense, and she wished Mim could be a little nicer. Fili pulled the blue bowl over and set it in front of him. "I can't give you answers if I don't know your questions," he said coolly, "And I do need to know how this place is protected."

"You only need to know that you're safe here as long as you and your brother don't go beyond the gate. Do it, and you can't get back in." Mim reached over and grabbed the flour from the counter. She started pouring it into the bowl as she talked. "As for questions, I need to know why you're traipsing around in the mountains, attracting all manner of foul beasts and getting yourselves hurt and then winding up half dead in my donkey's cart with the girl worrying over you." She set down the flour and looked down at Fili. "And don't say going to visit relatives. That brother of yours isn't half the liar he thinks he is."

Fili's face darkened. "My brother isn't a liar. He was telling the truth."

"But not the whole truth," Mim said. She pulled something from her pocket and set it on the table by Fili's elbow. It was a pair of silver clasps, ones that you put in your hair to hold it back. Camy had a few of them herself, though she only used them when she was working with herbs. These weren't hers though.

"Those are mine and Kili's," Fili growled.

"I know," Mim said. She flipped one of the hair clasps over and tapped her fingertip against a symbol on the clasp. It was a mountain encircled with a crown. "I also know that the line of Durin does not return on the path to the Lonely Mountain to simply visit relatives."

A/N: Explanations revealed in the next chapter! Woohoo! :D And sorry this chapter wasn't super exciting, lol, I promise the next one will be better! Hmm, I miiight include a peak at Thorin in the next chapter; I don't think he's in a very good state of mind at the moment.