Middle-earth, and all who dwell within it, belongs to Tolkien. I am grateful to him for growing this beautiful garden in which our imaginations can play. Please review!

They slept the rest of the night undisturbed, and before the first light of dawn colored the sky, Fili was awake; he had no intention of wasting a single moment of daylight. He rose before Betta, but she opened her eyes the moment his feet touched the floor. Kili was still snoring in his bed twisted up in blankets. Fili had to unwrap him and dump him onto the floor to rouse him.

They packed their things and did not bother to rearrange the rooms, leaving that to the innkeeper and his staff. Kili prepared the ponies with Betta and helped her to load their baggage; she touched the animals as little as possible and they seemed as wary of her as she was of them. Before they rode away, Fili had a quiet word with the innkeeper.

When they set off again, he had half the coins he had paid for the rooms back in his pockets and additional food to last them two days at least from the innkeeper's stores. It was no more than dried fruit and nuts and a few loaves of stale bread, but it was better than the slop that they had eaten the night before. Kili was cheerful, declaring that they had come out ahead in the end, but Fili was silent. He had not liked the look of the innkeeper as they rode off, and the kitchen boy was nowhere to be seen.

Fili pressed them on down the main road. They could not let the ponies run, not without all their baggage tumbling away behind them, but he insisted that they ride through the morning. He allowed them only one short break to dismount and walk the animals after several hours, and that was only because Betta refused to ride farther without a chance to stretch her legs. They made it eight leagues before they stopped at midday for their meal.

From the hill where they stood, the shining ribbon of the Little Lhun wound less than a mile below them with the road following it for the most part along its bends. Fili planned to follow the road for another twenty-five leagues or so until it curved southwards and passed over the main crossing, a ferry, a few miles north of where the little river met the big. There was a large town there, practically a city by the standards of the northern lands, but Fili meant to leave the road and turn north before they reached it and to make for a little used ford that he knew some miles up the river. There, the banks drew as close together as they would ever come and the river bed was rocky and shallow. Except when the river flooded in the spring, three ponies could cross it easily, and they would not be seen. After their attack at the inn, Fili was wary and did not like that many should know that they were going out into the wild without a large guard.

That afternoon, they rode without singing and with very little talk between them. For a few hours at least, the clouds had broken and the sky was a clear, icy blue that promised winter, but not just yet. The sun that shone down on them was warm.

They met only one other company of travellers on the road that day, an old farmer and his wife on a wagon riding slowly west toward the mountains. The farmer looked strangely at the two Dwarfs and woman, but his wife smiled and Betta raised her hand to them as she passed.

"Good journey," she called.

"And you," the wife answered. Her husband frowned but nodded his head before urging his horses to trot faster.

Fili and Kili glanced at each other and said nothing. They were both surprised that Betta would say anything when she seemed so wary of strangers, wary even of her own companions.

About a mile after they had passed the wagon, Kili let his pony drop back a few lengths from where he had ridden beside his brother and instead kept pace with Betta who had followed several lengths behind the Dwarves since setting out.

"You are riding better today," he said. "I no longer fear that you will fall off the animal."

"I am glad that you no longer fear it," she said.

"You carry a bow as well," Kili commented. He had seen it in her baggage and thought that it was a crude tool, inferior to his own. "I am curious to see how well you use it. But the bow is a distance weapon, and a knife is for close quarters. You are a contradiction. Why not learn to wield a sword as well?"

"Swords do not grow on trees," she said. "And a sword is a weapon of war, made for battle. It has no other use. A knife is useful for many things, only one of which is as a weapon of defense when there is no other choice but to fight. My bow belonged to my father."

"He taught you to shoot?"

She shook her head. "He taught me to hunt. The rocky lands of Lossarnach are not so fertile as the fields of fair Lebennin. After my brothers declared that they would leave our farm and join the soldiers of Gondor to guard the wall of the Pelennor, I made my father teach me so that we would not starve in bad times. My arrows are my own. I made them."

"They look… well made," Kili said. He was no more impressed by the crude shaft and wild-bird feathers than he was by the bow, but he heard the pride in her voice and did not tell her so.

Betta looked ahead at Fili, who rode before them and pretended not to hear them speaking. "I am sorry for the loss of your mother," she said quietly to Kili. "Forgive me if I speak out of turn, but I know that it is a hard thing to bear."

He swallowed the grief in his throat. "It is hard," he agreed. "Did you not say that your own mother died in grief after the loss of your father?"

"She did. I nursed her on her final bed, and she spoke only his name."

"I think… I think that it was the same for us. Our mother – Dis was her name – she was changed after the death of our father and never recovered from the loss of him. Fili looked up to our father more than anything, but he dearly loved our mother. He never used to be so single minded and stubborn until the loss of her. He was her favorite, you know."

"It is good that you have your uncle still," Betta said.

They rode in silence again. Kili struggled to remember what she had said of her family history days ago when they had sat in a pub, and he had thought her a liar. All that he could recall of her kin was that they were all or most of them dead. He had always loved his uncle, the famous Thorin Oakenshield, but now he realized just how lucky he was to still have the old Dwarf looking after him, and to have Fili, his brother as well. How quickly he could lose all that he had left.

.

They rode all day, from sunup to sundown. Betta was tired and sore and whether Kili thought she rode well or not, she had pains in places that she did not know could feel pain. Her teeth were on edge from the constant up and down of the pony's trotting, and she was tired of listening to the wind. It had picked up as the day drew on and, after their brief talk, Kili had returned to his brother's side. If they had spoken, they had been too far ahead for her to hear the words.

"We'll camp here for the night," Fili said, pulling up his horse. There was a low ridge to the east to give them shelter but little else on the wide, hard plain. "With luck, we will reach the ford before tomorrow's end and make camp on the eastern shore. Then it will be your turn to lead."

Betta climbed down from her pony, nearly falling to the ground as her stiff limbs protested. The ground was hard and, after the warmth of the day, the wind was growing colder. Riding was tiring work, and she took down her pack and unrolled her blanket, ready to wrap herself up and sleep even without dinner. The pony would look after itself.

The dwarves had taken down their bags and were setting up the camp. "There's kindling enough," Fili said. "See if you can't find some larger wood for the fire."

"Fire?" Betta looked up in surprise. She saw that Fili had gathered a small pile of twigs and brush. Kili had taken out a pan and a bundle of food, mostly dried meat and hard cheese, and he was making preparations for the evening meal.

"Unless you'd rather freeze to death in your sleep," Kili said. "The night will be cold, and we will have little shelter." He took the pan and walked off in search of water for their cooking.

Betta sat staring a moment then stood up, shaking her head. The food in her pack needed no cooking. She seldom built a fire when she was in the wild unless she had hunted or fished and needed to cook the raw flesh. It was cold here, certainly, but not so cold that they would freeze even after the ground had forgotten the heat of the day.

Her knees protested, but she walked away from the ridge in search of firewood. There were only small twigs, the remains of low bushes that had grown in the summer. Nearer to the river there would be small groves and even perhaps enough trees together to be called a wood, but on the plain they had little chance to thrive. In the distance, against the fading light of dusk, she saw the silhouette of a single, naked tree. She walked that way, looking for branches.

The tree was young, but it had been aged by the harsh weather. It was still alive and bore a few lingering leaves on its shivering arms. There was a large fallen branch nearby and many smaller sticks that it had shed. Betta reached out and pressed her hand against the cold truck of the tree; she looked up at the branches and saw the stars shining as if though outstretched fingers. She did not realize that she was smiling.

"Are you an Elf now?" Kili said, coming up behind her. "Tell me, what does the tree say to you?"

Betta's smile fell away and she saw that he had an axe in his hand. She knew from the way he looked at the tree that he intended to cut the whole thing down and drag it back to camp. It would be more wood than they needed for one nigh but easier than gathering loose branches.

"It says that it is cold," she said, "and lonely."

She gathered her arms full of dead wood from the ground and left Kili and the tree. She knew that Dwarves had little love for growing things, their hearts were given to rock and stone, but still she hated the waste.

At the camp, Betta dropped her load next to Fili and went back to her blanket. She had not brought enough to keep the fire going all night, but she didn't care. She did not need a fire.

Fili frowned at her, but he had never known her not to be in a foul mood, so he didn't question it this time. He built his fire and set the pot, now full of water from a nearby spring, on to boil. Not long after, Kili returned. He carried an armload of wood that was twice the size of what Betta had brought, but it was all dead wood; behind him, he dragged what was left of the large, fallen branch to be chopped up later as the night wore on. His axe hung at his belt, unused.

Kili glanced at her as he crouched down beside his brother, holding his hands out to warm them by the fire. Betta sat apart, wrapped in her blanket, refusing to share in the warmth. The smell of cooking meat made her stomach grumble, and she took out a bundle of dried fruit, cheese and bread from her bag. It was poor fare compared to the savory stew that the dwarves were cooking up.

She was surprised when Fili approached her with a bowl and put it into her hands. He said nothing, but he accepted the small loaf of bread that she held up to him - better by far than the dry stuff that the Dwarves had packed. He took it back to the fire to share with his brother.

Betta ate her meal. The Dwarves' stew was far better than that of either the inn that they had stayed in the night before, or the inn she had stayed in near Ered Luin. Fili and Kili were speaking together again, softly and the crackling of the fire and the whistling of the wind covered it. Now and then, one of them would look her way, but she was too tired to notice. She finished her food and curled up under her blanket. She lay with her head resting on one of her bags and fell asleep.

"I suppose that we should practice following our soon-to-be guide," Fili said not long after that. "Sleep now, Kili. I will take the first watch."

I am so grateful to those of you who have read this far and are still interested. I've lost count of the hours that I've spent writing and researching for this story. If like what you've read, please send me a message or write a review letting me know what you think, what you like or mistakes that you've found. I write for myself, but I post the chapters for you all.

- Paint