A/N: I own nothing; a huge thanks for reading, and double thanks to Raven with a Writing Desk and RevanOrdo7567 for your continued review support! :D

"That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!"

The song ended with a riot of cheers, and Amaranth peeled herself away from the wall to peer into the dining room. Over Bilbo's shoulder she saw all the dwarves, and even Gandalf, laughing from behind the table full of piled dishes.

"Well, at least you can't say they didn't try," she murmured to an even more befuddled Bilbo than before (if that were possible).

He didn't have a chance to answer.

Someone knocked three times on the front door, and silence smothered the smial. Only Gandalf dared break it.

"He is here."

Bilbo turned stiffly toward the door, but Gandalf stood quickly. "Let me answer that, Bilbo."

The dwarves filed out of the dining room to clear his way, and he ducked under the lintel into the main passage. In all the shuffle, Bilbo was swept in the wizard's wake, but Amaranth, trying to keep out of everyone's way, found herself shuffled around the corner back toward the kitchen. Then Kili was grabbing her hand and tugging her up toward the passage again, all but running in his excitement. "You don't want to miss my uncle meeting Bilbo, do you?"

No, she probably didn't, if only because Bilbo might have some choice words for the leader of this troupe—especially since he couldn't very well rage at Gandalf.

But as soon as Gandalf opened the door and a rumbling voice greeted him from the darkness, Amaranth knew Bilbo wouldn't be raging at this dwarf either.

"I thought you said this place would be easy to find," the newcomer said, stepping inside. His heavy boots thudded on the boards like hammers. "I lost my way, twice."

"I can tell he's your relation," Amaranth muttered to Kili, who muffled his laugh. Fili, standing a little behind them, let out a quiet huff as well.

"Would not have found it at all had it not been for that mark on the door," their uncle continued, unfastening his cloak. Ori and another dwarf standing nearest the door bowed as he moved past, though the tallest one—Dwalin, she thought—did not. Odd.

Then Bilbo wriggled between them and out into the entryway. "Mark? There's no mark on that door, it was painted a week ago!"

Kili's uncle completely ignored Bilbo, turning instead to Fili and Kili with a soft, proud smile of greeting that completely transformed his face—and glossed right over Amaranth standing between them. With an answering smile Kili took the proffered cloak and tucked it under his arm.

Gandalf, meanwhile, had claimed responsibility for vandalizing the door and was beckoning for her cousin to face his latest guest. "Bilbo Baggins, allow me to introduce the leader of our company—Thorin Oakenshield."

Smile fading, Thorin turned from his nephews and took two slow steps toward Bilbo. Looked him up and down. Crossed his arms deliberately. From behind, Amaranth couldn't tell what sort of expression he now had on his face, and his first words gave nothing away. "So. This is the hobbit."

Yes, dwarves definitely could use work on their manners, she decided. He could at least have said, Thank you for feeding the twelve bottomless wells I have for friends, Master Baggins. Or maybe, Hello, a pleasure to meet you. But no, he was circling her cousin like a cat toying with a mouse.

"Tell me, Master Baggins, have you done much fighting?"

"P-pardon me?" Bilbo tried to spin to keep up with Thorin's pacing.

"Axe or sword? What's your weapon of choice?"

Bilbo shrugged. "Well, I do have some skill at conkers, if you must know"—a slight exaggeration, unless he'd grown better since fifteen years ago, but under the circumstances Amaranth would allow it—"but I fail to see, uh, why that's relevant . . ." He quailed under Thorin's steady gaze and plucked at one of his suspenders.

"Thought as much." Now the smirk in Thorin's voice was clear. He tossed over his shoulder, "He looks more like a grocer than a burglar."

They all chuckled. Even Kili (who almost earned himself another slap on his hand before Amaranth remembered she should probably not do that with this majestic but awful uncle standing right there, especially one who talked about axes and swords so casually). Even Gandalf (who she thought had more manners than that, but maybe when one was a wizard one did not have to pay attention to things like manners or the rules of hospitality).

Then Thorin turned toward the dining room, and Amaranth remembered the stacks and stacks of dishes on the table. She yanked on Kili's sleeve. "Can you help me clear the dishes? I'm not sure you'd all fit in the parlor if you have business to attend to."

"Of course!" He waved at the dwarves standing behind them. "Bofur, Bombur, Nori, lend us a hand?"

Fili came along too, and the five of them did all the heavy lifting, toting the dirty dishes to the empty pantry for the time being. Which left Amaranth to bob a curtsy to Thorin (rude as he may have been to Bilbo, there was something in his manner that demanded respect), beg his pardon for the mess, and promise it would be cleared in a jiffy.

He nodded with a polite smile. "No trouble, Mistress Baggins."

"Oh, I'm not—I'm his cousin, Amaranth Brandybuck. Just helping him out a bit after your lot invaded—I mean, dropped by for supper, I'm sorry!" Her and her big mouth. "Let me go get you a plate."

"My thanks" was all he said as she practically ran for the kitchen. Between her and Bilbo, this Thorin Oakenshield must think hobbits terribly silly creatures now. She found a half-empty pot of soup hanging over the kitchen fire, and she ladled some into a bowl Bofur tossed her (after she wiped it out with her dishcloth, of course). Then there was a small plate of rolls left over, and she set the soup bowl in the center with the rolls all around. With that in one hand and both untouched pieces of pie in the other, she hurried back to the dining room and set the food down on the table in front of a now seated Thorin.

The others were ranged around the table as well with fresh tankards of ale, the little room crammed full of solemn bearded faces and dark, staring eyes. Gandalf had somehow fit his giant self into a corner by the doorframe, but she didn't see Bilbo anymore.

Now that the dinner crisis was over, and she had time to think, it was probably time for her to leave. The pies had been delivered, Bilbo no longer had to fend off dwarves from his crockery and antiques, and with Thorin's arrival she had no doubt that the rowdiness was not coming back.

But she still didn't know why they were here.

She was hovering in the passage just outside the dining room, undecided between duty to her poor cousin Prisca (well, second cousin by marriage, really) and her poor actual cousin Bilbo, when she finally caught Bilbo's eye. He was crammed up on a stool behind Gandalf, barely visible over the wizard's shoulder. When their eyes met, she gave a little wave and made as if to go, just to see if he still needed her.

From the way his eyes widened and he jerked his head in the most vigorous of negatives, that was an absolute for-the-love-of-my-sanity-Amaranth-please-stay.

Very well then.

But it wasn't as if she'd been invited, so she could hardly go join Bilbo on his perch. She nodded reassuringly at him, then sat down on a stepstool shoved to one side of the dining room entry, keeping the wall between her and Gandalf while staying in easy earshot. She'd just listen a little while, discover what brought thirteen dwarves and a wizard to Bag End, then collect her curiosity and her basketful of pie pans and head for Uncle Polo's.

One of the older dwarves—Balin, by the sound of it—was asking about a meeting in Ered Luin. "Did they all come?"

The thud of a tankard on the table. "Aye," Thorin answered, "envoys from all seven kingdoms."

From the way the others responded, this seemed to be a good thing. But then one of them spoke up, "What do the dwarves of the Iron Hills say? Is Dain with us?"

There was a tense pause before Thorin finally said, "They will not come. They say this quest is ours, and ours alone."

A quest. That sounded grand to Amaranth. But thirteen dwarves did seem a small number for such a thing.

The ensuing silence was broken by Bilbo, of all people. "You're—going on a quest?"

Yes, good job, cousin, keep them talking.

Gandalf cleared his throat. "Bilbo, my dear fellow, let us have a little more light."

A moment later, Bilbo came out and plucked a candle from the overhead candelabrum. He glanced over at Amaranth perched on the stool and gave her a slightly puzzled look, but she put her finger to her lips and he moved on, shaking his head, to collect a candleholder from the shelf nearby.

In the dining room, there was the rustle of parchment as Gandalf continued, "Far to the East, over ranges and rivers, beyond woodlands and wastelands, lies a single, solitary peak." It was the single most beautiful sentence Amaranth had ever heard.

Bilbo leaned over Thorin's shoulder and said as if reading, "The Lonely Mountain." Gandalf must have pulled out a book or a map or something of that nature, she decided. Bilbo set the candle down and left the dining room again, coming over to sit by Amaranth with a sigh.

"Aye," another voice chimed in, "Oin has read the portents—" Scoffing and longsuffering sighs arose, but the speaker kept going. "—And the portents say it is time."

She leaned her head to one side to examine her cousin. "You don't want to stay in there? Find out what it's all about?"

He shook his head, whispering back, "To be quite honest, cousin Amaranth, I want to go to sleep and wake up with all this having been just a very bad—"

"'When the birds of yore return to Erebor, the reign of the beast will end.'" That must be Oin, though Amaranth wasn't sure what face went with the name.

Bilbo stiffened, and she poked him in the shoulder. "Don't say you're not at least a tiny bit curious what they're talking about. I know I am."

He hesitated, then stood. "Oh, very well." Back to the door he went, asking, "Beast? What—beast?"

"Oh, that would be a reference to Smaug the terrible, chiefest and greatest calamity of our age," said one of them—Bofur, perhaps?—far too calmly. "Airborne firebreather. Teeth like razors, claws like meathooks. Extremely fond of precious metals—"

"Yes, I know what a dragon is," Bilbo snapped.

Ori, meanwhile was making empty threats against this dragon, until someone told him to sit down and Balin pointed out, "The path would be difficult enough with an army behind us, but we number just thirteen—and not thirteen of the best, nor brightest."

"We may be few in number, but we're fighters, all of us! To the last dwarf!" Fili exclaimed, with a thump on the table.

"And you forget," Kili cut in, "we have a wizard in our company. Gandalf will have killed hundreds of dragons in his time!"

Really? No one had ever mentioned that. Amaranth leaned carefully around the corner and looked up at Gandalf, but he was hemming and hawing and puffing little smoke rings through his beard and not answering any of the dwarves as they pressed him, so that didn't bode well for this quest thing. She was starting to piece it together—Smaug the dragon in this Lonely Mountain, the dwarves wanted to fight him because of a prophecy about birds—but it seemed doomed to failure, as almost everyone so far had managed to point out in one way or another. And yet she couldn't help wondering, what if, what if . . .

Now they were all yelling again. Dwarves certainly did know how to make a racket. Bilbo was waving his arms at them in an attempt to silence them, but it was Thorin's deafening shout that finally did the job (and made Amaranth whack her head against the wall when she startled).

"If we have read these signs, do you not think others will have read them too? Rumors have begun to spread—the dragon Smaug has not been seen for sixty years. Eyes look east to the mountain, assessing. Wondering. Weighing the risk. Perhaps the vast wealth of our people now lies unprotected."

Ah. Now that was a more reasonable motivation than the prophecy about birds. And if the dragon might be dead anyway...

"Do we sit back while others claim what is rightfully ours? Or do we seize this chance to take back Erebor!"

The company's cheers were cut short by Balin once again bringing common sense to the table (Amaranth was quite beginning to like that particular dwarf, even if common sense did seem a bit gloomy). "But you forget, the front gate is sealed. There is no way into the mountain."

"That, my dear Balin, is not entirely true."

Both Thorin and Bilbo stared in Gandalf's direction. Barely above a whisper, Thorin asked, "How came you by this?"

"It was given to me by your father—by Thrain—for safekeeping. It is yours now." Gandalf's hand reached out toward Thorin, and Amaranth caught a glimpse of dark metal before it vanished into the dwarf's fist.

"If there is a key"—ah, thank you, Fili, so that's what it was—"there must be a door."

"These runes speak of a Side-Door on the western side of the Mountain, a hidden passage to the Lower Halls," Gandalf replied, with another rustle of parchment. "'Five feet high the door and three may walk abreast,' it says, too small for Smaug ever to have crept through at all."

"There's another way in." She could hear the grin in Kili's voice, and it was contagious. A secret door to a dragon's lair...razor teeth or not, this was exciting.

Gandalf seemed to sense the rising spirits in the room and added quickly, "Well, if we can find it. But dwarf doors are invisible when closed. The answer lies hidden somewhere in this map, but I do not have the skill to find it—but there are others in Middle Earth who can. The task I have in mind will require a great deal of stealth, and no small amount of courage, but if we are careful, and clever, I believe that it can be done."

"That's why we need a burglar."