When the gate was unlatched it was by the Lord of the town himself. Bard stood in the dim light into the darkness settled around, and stared with vague sympathy at the two dwarves, both swaying slightly after hours standing, waiting and watching at the wall. Tauriel was awake and alert next to Kili, and she greeted Bard with a small but graceful bow; he seemed a bit confused but offered a nod of his head.
Fili came to his wits and spoke in a hoarse drawl that he struggled to make sound kingly: "Lord Bard. I understand your hesistation in coming to us, and between lord and ruling prince nothing is begrudged on my part. But our original purpose is lost on the late hour. We ask refuge for the night –we arrived midday and would be hard pressed to return in the morning," lest they receive the same coldness at the gate –but he didn't say so. In the brief pause Bard did not insist protest, so he went on: "I do have matters to discuss, if you'd allow it. But we are hungry and tired –and would request not more than humble lodging and a small bit of food to sleep comfortably tonight."
Bard quickly gestured the three in and asked one of his men to close and lock the gate again for the night. "Unless we have more weary travelers at our door –then be a bit quicker in telling me." The gruff man nodded his head and pushed the large wooden door shut and barricaded it tight.
They were led briskly to the town hall, and among the three from the mountain only Tauriel knew –with a little relief— that it was where the Lord and his family lived in the rooms above, no more extravagantly than they had on the lake. It was also where, earlier, the great feast had been had by the increasingly prosperous people. There was a long road yet ahead of them, but tragedy had brought rebirth and revitalization to the grim fishermen and listless fishermen's families.
Bard was explaining quickly why it had been they were left waiting out in the dark and cold for so long, while he called his children to bring blankets for their guests. "My guards were… reluctant to alert me to your arrival, especially while the feast was going. I was finally told not an hour ago –and there's little food left over to offer you, but what will be lacking there might be made up for in accommodations."
Fili listened through a daze to the explanation and tried to make peace with his worries, granting them the time they'd been left outside while relieving his mind with the warmth around him, the hospitality they were being granted at last.
With some help from his son –whom Fili remembered as a rather slight teen, but had grown into a lithe but sturdy young man— Bard pulled three cots from a storage room in back and set them up in the large hall. The clang of iron legs against well-worn wooden floors echoed in the empty vastness, a sound similar to one familiar and comforting to the dwarf brothers. The lord of the town made a brief inquiry of his son –Fili's fuddled mind suddenly recalled his name to be Bain— and was satisfied to hear that Sigrid was gathering blankets and boiling water for tea, and Tilda gathering scraps of food from the pantry.
Bain patted the low stiff mattress of the first cot to be assembled, looking at the blond prince with a nervous smile. "I'm sorry it isn't much."
Fili shook his head and gave a sleepy smile, one that curled strangely into his cheeks but reached his quarter-lidded eyes. "It's more than enough, thank you." He did not take the first bed for himself, nor did Kili (tired as he was, up much too early that morning). Tauriel would willfully decline coming to rest before the two but took a seat willingly. She reached out and wrapped an arm around Kili's waist and pulled him to stand against her before his legs would fail him.
They all had the chance to sit when the final cot's legs were steady beneath it, and by then Bard's daughters had arrived. Tilda arrived first, trotting down the stairs quickly but arms stiff so she wouldn't spill the tea in three wooden cups huddled to one corner of the tray, or drop the collective pile of a hodgepodge of food bits. She was a clumsy sort of ease to her in her early teenage years, the redness of sleep around her bright eyes but a very genuine and eager smile on her face as she handed out the guests' meals.
"I remember you," she whispered to each of them, and got sleepy fond smiles in return. Whatever they didn't take right away she set on a nearby table, strolling about the room in case she was needed further. "My sister will be down soon with the blankets," she informed, leaning back on her folded hands against a pillar. "They were on a higher shelf than she expected, and needed to find a stool while I gathered the food and watched the teapot."
"Sorry, I'm coming!" And the older sister, the eldest of the Lord's children, came down the stairway, watching her step around a pile of blankets.
Fili failed to convince himself that it was the tiredness of his eyes that were to blame for his stare. He hadn't seen Sigrid since Laketown had burned and scarcely a word had been exchanged between them. (He remembered shielding the children –then all of them children— from the orcs, and helping her specifically into the boat –"Give me your hand.") He'd had no chance then to properly look at her, to feel as stricken with her as he was now. He could blame her relative youth (she must've been twenty or twenty-one now, he guessed) at the time; or the frantic time he'd spent by her in Laketown, between the urgency of the quest drawing to a close, Kili's frightful illness, orcs and elves, an a town set ablaze. Whatever had muddled his view then had cleared away in time and now, he couldn't look away.
Her own eyes, as clear as the prince's and more at ease than last he'd seen them, settled on him as well –but much more briefly, he noted with a pang of something distressing: only a moment longer on his face than the others as she handed out woolen blankets.