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Betta stared into the dancing light and shadow of the fire and thought of her father and how he used to sit alone at the family table with a single candle for company. Bereg could spend hours staring into the distance, his lips moving silently as he recalled the tales of his ancestors. Had it only been two nights ago that she swore to lay aside his memory, that she said she would never think on the man again?
She took the box from her bag and the map from its envelope under her shirt. The map she laid upon her knee, but the box she held and looked at in the dim firelight. She lifted the lid to examine the underside as the Ranger had done.
"Harandir said that he recognized the shapes stamped upon this metal, and I am inclined to believe him," she said. She put the box down upon the stone floor. "Your own eyes saw the marks upon the cornerstone of Ankor, and if you looked, you would see that there are similar markings on the broken stones piled there." She nodded to the mouth of the cave and the mound of rock that she had climbed to escape being crushed under the troll's heavy boots.
Kili glanced back toward the pile, but that part of the cave was far from the circle of firelight and invisible against the growing dark of the storm. In the south, the sky would be bright with the late winter sun that promised a coming spring, but here winter ruled and daylight ended early.
Fili did not take his eyes from Betta's face. He watched her intently and weighed each word with suspicion. "It is neither the box nor the map that I am interested in tonight," he said. "What of the stone? This stone, that you have never explained to us."
"The stone that you did not show to Harandir?" Betta asked. She shrugged her shoulders. "The map, the box and the stone are all pieces of the same story. You knew that there were other words written on the map that came out of my father's box, but it has been many days since you mentioned them. Perhaps you have forgotten…"
Fili said nothing, but she did not wait for his answer.
"I never forgot them, but it has been a sore trial to translate the arcane script. Even now, I cannot say that I have done it all aright. I learned my father's father-tongue through spoken poem and story; I learned the elvish script at my mother's knee, but it is not written the same way that we used it in Gondor. Many of the words are new to me or altered in ways that I cannot explain. It would take weeks in a warm room to do justice to the job, and even then…" She glanced at Kili. "I told you this before we left Ered Luin."
He nodded but said nothing. He had told Fili that Betta wished to postpone the journey long enough to translate the map, but his brother had his own reasons for refusing to delay.
"And so," she continued, "warm hands or not, I have done what I could with it, and the result is this: many long years ago, I know not how many, there were men and women in the bitter cold of Forodwaith living uncomfortably side-by-side with evil creatures, trolls, dragons, orcs and others. One day, a man left from his village and went into the dungeons of a dragon. He took from the old worm a stone, that stone." Betta nodded at Fili's clenched fist.
"It may have been part of the dragon's hoard - even in the cold north, the beasts must crave treasure - but I have puzzled over these words for many long hours while I kept my turn at watch, and I am almost certain that I have them right. This story says that the thing was taken 'from the belly of The Beast.'
"What beast? How do you know that this beast was a dragon?" Kili asked.
"The word in my father's tongue means beast, but it was only ever used to mean dragon. As far as our tale goes, I do not know whether this part of the tale means that the man slayed the dragon and took out of its belly a treasure that it had swallowed; or, perhaps, it is only part of the poet's art, and the 'belly' is the beast's buried hoard. It may be something else entirely…"
She faltered for a moment and rubbed her hands together over the fire. "You must understand that the stories my father told us, were childhood fables to me. Until this journey, I had never seen any evidence of orcs or dragons. The soldiers that returned from the battles in the east spoke of orcs as being servants of the enemy, but I lied in the safety of Lebennin, and they were as real to me as… as…" She shook her head. "I do not know the legends of your people. You must have tales that your mother told you at night, creatures created for amusement or fear but that even as they were told, you knew they were not real."
"We have no such tales," Kili said. "Why would any Dwarf make up stories of an enemy that is not real when there are so many in this world that are?"
"I wonder whether my own people have such tales," she said sadly. "Those monsters that I thought were not real have appeared before my eyes, even a snow-troll!" She shook her head. "What was real to me in my girlhood were the cruel Haradrim and the heretic Easterlings. What are dragons dwelling on the edge of a tale compared to the bloodied sword that cut the life from my uncles?"
Kili felt his heart soften a little. He tried to understand her words, but though she had no proof of dragons, a Dwarf could say no such thing. It took little searching in Ered Luin to find dwarves old and young who had lost family in Erebor, or who had seen the dragon's fire with their own eyes. Fili's face was still harsh, but Kili could see that he was listening and her words were affecting him.
"What do you think the story means?" Kili asked softly. "Was the stone stolen from a hoard or taken out of a dragon's gut? You say you have your guesses…"
"I do," Betta said, but she hesitated. "I do and I may be wrong, but I think that it is both. There is a word written on the edge of one page, faded with time and nearly gone." She took up the page and handed it to him. "There, in the left-lower corner. It seems to have been written by a different hand than the rest."
Kili saw the word, but shook his head. "It is a different hand, but I do not read elf-letters." He glanced at Fili but saw the corner of his brother's mouth twitch with disdain at the mention of that race and decided not to ask him to translate the script.
"I doubt that this word has ever been written in them before," she said. "I know it from my grandmother. The word is bezoar."
He shook his head. "I do not know it."
"It is medical," she explained, "from the east, I suppose. There were Easterling settlements on the western strand; my father knew them. He…" She fell silent suddenly and frowned as if at some dark and passing thought, but before Kili could ask, she shook her head and went on.
"I do not wholly understand the process, but my grandmother was a healer and once, after one of our neighbors complained of terrible stomach pains, she told me that sometimes men eat food that they are not meant to eat. Sometimes, those foods form stones in the belly. Most often, the stones can be passed through the course of nature, although there is much pain involved. The worst of these must be removed by surgery, and even then the patient often dies. There were whispers among the old women in Lebennin that evil magicians from the East would defile the bodies of dead men looking for such stones, and that they used them as talismans."
"The men of the east do not honor the dead as a free people would," she added quietly.
"This happens, these stones, with Men, you say," Fili said sharply, speaking for the first time. "You expect me to believe that a dragon's innards behave in the same way as a Man's? That does not speak very highly of your race."
"Your brother asked me to say what was my guess, and I have told you," Betta said. "It is formed from the information on my pages, from the stories that I have heard, and from my grandmother's knowledge of healing. You called it a pearl when first you held it; perhaps it is one. What are pearls but stones formed in the bellies of sea-creatures? That one in your hand may have been formed in the sea. It may even have been swallowed by a dragon and fished out of the droppings afterwards. Such things have been known to happen, though not usually with dragons…"
"Whatever the truth of it, I have told you what is written on the pages of our map. I would end my story there but your brother has been more polite in his requests. What I say now are my own thoughts and things that I have gathered from our journey and from the tale that Harandir told to us. They were his words that caused me to examine my pages in greater detail, but not until four nights ago did I recognize the pattern which first caused me to fear...
"My father's family had its own tales, its own language and, even, its own strange names for the stars. My mother refused to hear them. I learned only one constellation, and it was a shape taught to me in secret by my brothers and called by that same word that is used in the old legend, The Beast." She turned over the pages and looked at the map. Kili still held the fourth page. "Enough of those stars are copied out on this map to recognized the pattern that I had almost forgotten."
"And that was when you first thought of dragons," Kili said, handing her back the missing page. He glanced at his brother. "Four days is a long time to keep silent."
"That was the first time that I connected them with this story," Betta said quickly, "Your brother's words were fresh in my mind. It was the tale that he told of your future adventure that first made me think seriously of dragons, though my thoughts had turned more and more to the pages, seeking answers." She folded the pages together and returned them to their envelope.
"It was Harandir who told us of the people of Ankor, and that they were rumored to have been divided from the Lossoth. It is not difficult to put the pieces together once you know the shape of things, and there are many other stories that my father told to my brothers that I have not told to you. They seemed to be nonsense until I began to search deeper. If you will trust my word on this, I will weave the threads that I have gathered into what I think is the ending of our tale."
Kili looked at Fili, who motioned for her to go on. He refused to ask again aloud for his answers.
"That the stone was taken from a dragon. That much we know," she said. "How it was taken, we do not know, but it does not matter. The man who took it either knew what he had or discovered upon possessing it that it had certain powers. He treasured it as an heirloom of his family, and it was passed down from hand to hand until, at some point, there came strife among the man's descendants, perhaps with one side demanding the right to possess the stone and the other refusing to give it up. The winning side of this conflict carried the stone farther south, but the grudge lived on and the Lossoth are sundered from their kin.
"For some time after that, the stone and its master dwelt in these hills – I have seen their marks, and indeed I think that the hut below this cave was one of theirs and not made by the troll. They dwelt here, until the Dark Lord of Angmar drove them out, and then stone went south to Ankor, and later west to the River Lune. After the fall of the northern kingdom, the stone went south again to the sea where it was eventually sealed into a magic box with papers recording the history of the thing and a spell to preserve it."
"But why put it in the box?" Kili asked.
"Perhaps the family quarreled again," Betta said. "My father said that there used to be both a box and a key. If there was disagreement as to who should inherit the stone, even he who inherited the box that held it could not get at it without the key. But the key was lost and the box was handed down to my father. I have already told you how he died and how I took it from his belongings when I left Rohan."
Kili nodded and agreed that it her tale sounded reasonable enough. "And in all your stories, does it not say what powers are in the stone?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Not in so many words. In this, I think, that your brother's guesses would hit closer than mine," she said. "All that I can say is that in the legend, the stone is called both a Guardian of its Possessor and a Ward against Struggle. That is the best that I can translate the names; they are among those words that I do not know well. But, still, there is no evil in that. Guardian and Ward, they spoke enough of protection that I was little troubled to leave the stone in the hands of another. And, I admit it now, in my heart I began to hope that believing it would make it so. I hoped that I had passed a strong talisman into the hands of my... of a friend. I believed that it would protect you as we went farther east."
Her eyes were on Fili, searching his face, but he gave no sign of his thoughts. For a moment, Kili pitied her, but he guessed that it was not just Fili that she wished to protect by keeping so dangerous a thing secret from them.
"We went east," Betta went on, "and the land grew more evil and more dangerous than I expected. I began to wonder whether anything that had come out of this place could ever be wholly good, but by then my mind was occupied by other, more pressing needs. If we had continued north together, I would have told you these things willingly enough and willingly taken back the stone that you took from me. Two nights ago when we first arrived at the standing stone, I expected to tell you all this at our next camp. But then there was the hunt, and then… other things that distracted me from my purpose."
She looked at Fili pleadingly. "It was never my intention to leave a thing of danger in your hands. When we parted last night, you told me that you meant to go south, and I truly believed that in taking the stone with you, any evil it might hold would be left here in the north. I thought it would be easier to give the thing up than to explain… and after all, it has passed from hand to hand for generations in my family and there was no talk of a curse upon it."
"Your father carried that box for many long years," Fili said. "Do you say that it had no affect on him?"
She seemed surprised and disturbed by the suggestion. Kili watched the doubt pass over her face and guessed what she was thinking. Could it be that all the darkness and difficulties that had troubled her childhood, the division between her parents, her father's anger and cowardice and obsession with a crooked family line had all come from the box that he had held?
For a moment, Betta doubted, but then her uncertain frown tightened into resolve. She shook her head, but Kili had enough practice reading his brother's face to know that there was more stubbornness than certainty in her eyes.
"No," Betta said firmly, "if his troubles came from that thing, then the blame is not mine. I did not know it, and I do not know it now. The stone is not cursed. It is the land that has affected both the stone and you, Fili. It would have been better if I had never shown you that box."
"We would not have gone on this journey together…" Kili said slowly.
"But you would not have been put into danger by me. I still believe that the stone would be safe to handle if it were taken south and kept far from the place of its making. I cannot wish that we had never met, but I might at least wish that you had taken it away when you said that you would go, that you had not come after me. It would have saved us both a great deal of unnecessary pain."
Fili did not reply, and Betta bowed her head again. "That is all the tale that I can tell," she said. "It is not much, but my resources are few. Harandir might tell you more, or the Lossoth, if they do indeed still dwell upon the rim of Forochel; but, for now, you must be satisfied or cling to your anger and cast me out. I am no strong woman, and I acted only in the way that I thought best. For good or ill, it is done."
Silence fell again, and even the whistling wind outside the cave seemed muted by the gloomy twilight. Kili sat quietly and thought on all he had heard. He did not know what to make of it. Though there was a dragon in the tale, this was not the sort of thing that he was used to hearing; there seemed to be no beginning and no end. Or, if there was an end, they had yet to reach it.
Fili was thoughtful as well. "Best," he muttered, "yes, but best for who? Once more, you have kept to yourself a thing which concerns our whole company. You have let danger creep in close to us without saying a word. It is Evendim again, and the plains beyond the Lune when the wolves howled and came near yet no alarm was given."
"The wolves never came near," Betta protested. "You fabricate charges against me."
"And you do not answer my question," he said. "I did not know you were so diplomatic."
"I do what I can with what I have, not having been raised a prince."
Kili winced, and Fili's face hardened as surely as hot steel thrust into a cold bath. Kili had been ready to speak up in defense of Betta's choices, but now he bit his tongue and said nothing. It was, as Fili said, Evendim all over again, but not in the way that his brother had meant it. This was the same fight, the same battle that Fili and Betta had waged from the beginning, the one that Kili had sworn to keep out of. Once more, they were each at the other's throat with words rather than weapons, and who knew how the war would end?