Kili awoke and was welcomed with the smell of breakfast cooking. He walked down the hall to join Rhavaniel in the kitchen.
"I found the Warg you warned me about." she greeted him, pushing a plate in his direction. "I think it is dead now."
"You...what did you say?" Kili muttered. "Did you go outside without me? You should not do that!"
"I left you a note." Rhavaniel replied. She pointed to the paper on the table. She had used a blank page from a Dwarf book. The note was in Common Speech, but with the equivalent Dwarf runes written beneath most of the words.
"You ...you learned to read Khuzdul overnight?" Kili sputtered, "I only taught you three words!"
"Four words." she replied. "You forgot about honey."
"You told me you were slow!" Kili said with accusation in his tone.
"The book had pictures! How slow do you take me for?" Rhavaniel fired back.
Kili looked closely, and the primer was indeed heavily illustrated and lovingly hand tinted. It was actually a beautiful antique, better than any book he had at school.
"Khuzdul is elegant in its simplicity, and the primer was very straightforward. It was easy to decipher after that, and I had nothing else to do all night. I do not know how to pronounce anything, though. Perhaps you can teach me?" Rhavaniel asked eagerly.
"Skita!" Kili groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "Perhaps I can be disowned and shunned by my own kind in this life and the next?"
"What is 'skita'?" Rhavaniel asked with her typical innocent enthusiasm, "Where is that in the primer?"
Kili looked up from the table. "Breakfast can wait. We are going to check on this Warg you killed."
Kili hated being weak from his injuries. It had cost them precious time and now, left unsupervised, the Elf had run amok.
They left the house together, fully armed.
Rhavaniel explained her concern that the carrion birds would give away their location.
"That was smart." Kili told her, "Smart to think of it, but foolish to go out alone."
Rhavaniel showed Kili where the Warg went into the river. They tossed down a few bits of wood, and saw them rapidly disappear.
"He certainly could not have swum upstream from here." Kili said.
"Does not mean he won't pop out downstream, if he did not drown first."
"You were lucky." Kili told her sternly. Rhavaniel nodded. She knew she had been lucky that the bridge collapsed, and lucky that the Orcs they encountered had tried to take her as a prisoner rather than kill her on sight. She knew she was not nearly strong enough or smart enough to meet all of the dangers of Middle-earth yet, but she was learning.
They continued on to the Orc corpses. The Warg had done a good job, but they still needed to drag the torn remains to the hole in the river bridge to be sure. They had to keep the birds away.
It was still morning when they headed back to the house under the hill. Kili was exhausted and pale, and angry with himself at being weak. Another fierce storm was rolling in. They would not be traveling this day, Kili sighed, even if he had been stronger.
They ate a quick brunch. Rhavaniel and Kili went outside together to gather roots and berries near the house before the wind began to howl and the threat of lightning forced them back inside. They stayed busy, cleaning and preparing the food. Kili did his own inventory of their supplies, and put together fishing lines which he tossed in the river.
"Are you still angry with me?" Rhavaniel asked him over dinner.
"No, I am 'mad at myself', as you would say." Kili told her. "We have to move in the morning, no matter what."
"We will." she promised.