>I will shortly be editing this section and the next to reflect the movie's portrayal of Dain, since I believe he will add more color to the story, and because I was having a hard time characterizing my version of Dain anyway. Since Dain has thus far played such a small part in Mabyn's story I won't be leaving up the original version of the parts in which he intereacted with her.<
I dove back into the mountain and opened my mouth. “Bilbo! Bombur! Where’s the food? I’m hungry.” Those boys kept a close eye on our food sources, so they were guaranteed to know where to get me something to eat. That and they were the ones most likely to be concerned about my lack of food intake. I was glad to reward their friendship with some excess intake, if we had the supplies for it.
“Over here, lass!” called Bombur from a lower stair that crossed underneath mine. I searched, and he raised and arm and waved.
I waved back. “How do I get over there?”
“Go back the way you came and down the next staircase to your right, you’ll come down this way.” I did as he suggested and came out running on the lower staircase.
“Bombur, you promised food, where’s the food?”
He chortled. “I haven’t promised you anything yet lass! Come along, we’ll get you sorted out.” He led me onward and I skipped at his side.
“How are your new quarters?” I asked him as we bustled along. “What do they look like? Someone was talking to me when I was unconscious about how you were all being organized into actual homes within the mountain so you wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor. But they must be covered in dust, right?”
Bombur shook his head under the weight and speed of my questions. “Lass, you astound me. Was your tongue always this swift?”
“My whole being is swift, when I’m healthy and happy,” I said with a grin. “The happier I am the faster I talk.”
“Well, if you are so fascinated by the goings-on of the new Erebor that you missed, you shall be pleased to know that even if you haven’t seen them yet there has been constant cleaning going on.” We passed through a heavy wall—one which must be connected to the outside on some length, on account of the cold that radiated off of it—and Bombur threw out a heavy hand.
As we passed the wall’s threshold the sound of the workers beyond it in one of the vast, main halls reached us, and I went to the railing and stared, astounded. The hall was wide enough and tall enough that I imagined there would be barely any room in the mountain to fit anything else. It was filled, to my opinion. With dwarf men and women sweeping, mopping, moving debris, and picking dirt that Smaug had tracked in out of the grooves in the stone floor. I tugged Bombur’s sleeve. “I want to help. I’m strong now. I’m not afraid of heights either. There’s dust been shaken all over the walls from the mountain’s quaking, I can get up there.”
Bombur nodded. “I’ll mention it.”
I yanked his sleeve again as we continued walking, more urgently this time. “Who is in charge now? Now that….” Both of us dampened.
Bombur took in a deep breath. “That’ll be Dain of the Iron Hills. Many of the people of the Iron Hills and the Blue Mountains and elsewhere are already making the pilgrimage to refill Erebor. Gloin will be going soon to retrieve his own family.”
I nodded. “I should like to meet them. Do the rest of you have families?”
“Half of us came in particular because we didn’t.”
“And the other half?”
“For love of the mountain,” he answered simply. “For love of Thorin. Love of a quest. There’s little dwarves like better than gold but a quest comes close.”
“Hmm.” We walked a while longer. I was still unfamiliar with the mountain so I could not yet lead myself. “Will we be reaching this food of yours any time soon?”
“Calm yourself, feistytongs! Goodness me, I think you’re more excited by the prospect of eating than I am.”
Bombur was good to his word and guided me directly to a place of food with no tomfoolery or further waits. A room offshooting a kitchen had been laid out with numerous long tables, and upon the tables dishes of rolls and platters of cooling meats and fishes were almost constantly being refilled for the workers and warriors coming and going.
“Where is all this food coming from?” I asked.
“All the neighboring towns and cities have shipped the raw goods to us and to Dale. They’ve sent men to Dale to help rebuild it.”
“They’re not rebuilding Laketown?”
“Oh that as well, but I believe the residents of Laketown are tired of living amidst the ice and water. They’ve been milked on stories of Erebor and Dale since their great-grandparents were kings. They are eager to leave their poverty behind.”
I whirled to face him, struck with a sudden fear. “Bombur. Will I be allowed to stay here? I’m not one of you, not really, as much as I want to be.”
Bombur frowned down at me with concern. “Why wouldn’t you be? The only thing wrong with you is that you’re too skinny and there’s not enough hair on you.”
I rolled my eyes. “What, down to my butt isn’t enough?”
“Your face is too smooth; even our women have admirable beards, softer than any wool or silk.” He grinned.
I snorted. “Well I’m so very sorry for your loss. Now where may I sit?”
He gestured. “Wherever you’d like. There’s plenty of room.”
I heard a gasp and turned to see a portly—though they all were stout, healthy-looking ladies—woman in a dark blue dress and ivory apron, standing with her hands on her hips, and just as Bombur had described, a down of fluffy dark hair trailing down her rosy cheeks. The rest of her hair was braided back into several layers of efficient, unadorned crowns, but she had silver rings on nearly every finger. “You must be little miss Mabyn!” she exclaimed, beaming up at me. “We all were wondering who you were when we heard of you in the battlefield. When we heard you’d taken ill afterward we feared the shock had got your wits. Come here, come here, sit down. Where are you from? The lads wouldn’t tell us too much about you.” She waved me forth, and taken aback by the marvel of meeting a stranger who was genuinely interested in me, I sat. Bombur went around to the other side of the table and sat across from me so a small number of other ladies could bustle forth and bracket me in.
“The lads?” I asked, threading my legs over the bench and sitting. The other ladies were close beside me. I kicked my feet below the bench, as fascinated by them as they were by me, I’d imagine.
“Oh, the men of the Company. They’ll all be the Company for as long as the lot shall live, I’d imagine,” she surmised. “But we all were asking about you—we ladies—because it gave us such a fright to see you on the field if we did or hear about you after from those who had.” She had lovely, dark blue eyes, I was realizing.
Was there anybody in this realm who did not have blue eyes?
I looked to Bombur. “Why not?”
He shrugged, both hands already filled. “Well I couldn’t, you know I couldn’t. All of what I knew I knew second-hand to start with.”
This was fair. “What about the others? They all know me as well as anybody.”
Bombur shrugged again and tossed out his hands. “How should I know? As those about whom you’re inquiring, and then you’ll get your answers.”
I flapped a hand at him. “Oh go back to your sausages, you’re no help.”
“That’s lads for you,” said the lady to my left, a friend of the dark-blue-eyed woman on my right. “Never tell a lass anything useful. So go on,” she urged. “Fill in what the useless clots forgot.”
“Oh they’re not useless,” I disagreed, taking a roll for myself and very seriously shaking my head. “They were great when they were worrying their beards over me.”
“So you’re one of the ones that likes being fussed over, eh?” another lady asked with a wry smile.
I shook my head, dramatically aghast. “Gods no! They were just so funny to watch.”
The ladies chuckled, laughed or snorted depending on their natures. I was making friends already. Imagine that.
“Well I don’t know why the lads, as you call them, weren’t being forthwith with you because there are few things I gripe about being shared among friends,” I said honestly, getting into my roll, eating all the crisp outsides before getting to the softer inside lump. “But I’m from Aetna, a land across the sea far to the east. I came here alone, on account of having left an unfortunate situation in my own realm, and after I was picked up and stolen from and henceforth imprisoned by Goblins the dwarves were caught and nearly imprisoned too, from what I can piece together. They ran past my cell, I demanded they let me out, they did, and they offered me their protection until a safer place to leave me came along.” I swallowed a large gulp from the mug a woman passed to me, winced, and interjected to myself, “I’m going to have to mix that if I’m still sober enough to tell the end of this story.”
“Not got your wine gut developed yet, eh lass?” grinned Lady Blue Eyes. “We’ll get you sorted soon as can be, don’t you worry.”
“Just not tonight, I beg of you.”
“No no! You need to tell your story tonight!”
“Yes yes, get on with it!” said the lady from my left, and her request was echoed throughout our group. Bombur, who saw that I was getting into the swing of this, enjoying the joviality, smiled merrily from behind his egg sandwich.
“So there I was,” I said forty minutes later, into my second mug of wine and water, half of the first one having been mixed into this one and water distributed between, “dangling off the end of an elven guard’s spear, some sixty feet off the nearest ground, and not the safest-looking ground, either….”
And half an hour after that: “So I told the Elvenking all sorts of nonsense about my being like a flower withering in the cold if he should ever turn his adoring gaze from me and I’ll bet you can visualize a few of the things that crossed his face—”
“Does anything ever cross his face?” one lady wanted to know.
“A shadow perhaps,” suggest another. “Of a bird flying overhead.”
We laughed. “No no,” I said, putting my hand out to regain their attention. “See it was all part of some small scheme of his and mine, really. I swear the two of us are the worst of friends—if you can call us that, but we’re something—because I used him to get over some of my fear of certain types of people and he used me to appeal to Bard and the other humans, because frankly, he’s scary, and with me bobbing about and obviously not frightened of him I think the humans were more likely to be honest with him as opposed to telling him only what they thought he wanted to hear.”
It was only twenty minutes after that that I got to my sickness. I had been explaining it to them, along the way. Our cheer had diminished in the face of the seriousness that had come down the story with me and coalesced toward its end. “I wasn’t frightened so much as unhappy,” I said quietly. I had amassed a bit of a come-and-go crowd by now, based on who could be spared from their work or who was openly blowing it off, but the dwarves were very good at silence when something had their full interest. I might as well have been dripped in gold. “I was already dying you see, in my world, when the wizard set me back and the injury temporarily went away. So I knew what was happening, and I’d always known what was going to happen. Well, I thought I knew; clearly I didn’t.”
The dwarves wagged their heads. “Ah, the elves are like that, lass,” said a dwarf half-hidden by his peers. “You never know what you’re going to come up with or they are. Strange and unpredictable lot.”
I raised a finger. “Wholeheartedly seconded. But regardless I was convinced I was going to die and I’d been resignedly convinced of that for the last—what, five?—five months, so it wasn’t like this had come up on me unexpectedly. No, I’d expected it, all of it. So there was no unfortunate surprise….”
“So what replaced the lack of fear?” Lady Blue Eyes asked me, leaned forward with her elbow on the table, cheek on her fist, for once no longer chattering. “Just sadness?”
“Well of course there was a great deal of that.” I looked to Bombur, who was still eating, and around at all the others. “I had very few friends in my realm, you see. I suppose they loved me, those two friends I’d had. But my father and mother certainly hadn’t, and I hadn’t let anyone know me well enough to love me, or they hadn’t cared or tried to. I had never known what having a family was like, and now that I finally had it I was about to lose it all. Everything. The life I’d left my own world looking for, even knowing I was dying, and I was losing it. That was what I fought, the realization that I’d never get to keep what I’d run so far away to find.”
I abruptly faced Lady Blue Eyes again, having temporarily lost myself in the vestiges of the losing pains I’d had while I lay dying. “Madam, I don’t know your name. I’ve been calling you Lady Blue Eyes in my head but that’s a bit of a mouthful.”
She chuckled. “I’m sorry to have forgot to tell you, I’m Dila.” She pressed a hand into her voluminous bosom as though to keep the name safely there.
I turned about. “How about a few of the rest of you? I’m fairly sharp with names, I should remember most of them.” In truth I’d been hiding how sharp I was with remembering things until now. I knew exactly what I’d said to everybody and what anyone had ever said to me, but my memory had unnerved people in my world, so I had mostly hidden it here. If I was to make my home here permanently though, they deserved my honesty, even if it was difficult for us to reach at first.
The dwarves began shouting off names as rapidly as I could receive them, and since most of us barely knew each other anyway—more dwarves had been arriving by the day, Bombur had said—the practice was good for us all. I shot them back as they said them, then once more afterward to make sure I’d gotten them, and was rewarded with their smiles as I remembered them all.
Dila patted my hand to gather my attention. “You know I’ve heard, lass, that Dain is quite interested in speaking with you. With the Woodland Realm and Dale both being so close, we’re in a bit of a unique spot with three different races living so closely to each other. I’ve heard tell he’s thinking of setting you up to be an ambassador someday, on account of the accounts he’s heard from others on how you’ve conducted yourself on various occasions, especially with the Elvenking. After you’ve grown up a bit.” She fanned herself. “Goodness! The thought of the gumption it takes to sauce the Elvenking the way you have. Stars above.” She leaned forward again. “How old are you, dear? The Company wouldn’t tell us that either.”
I glanced at Bombur. He shrugged and half-smiled. I rolled my eyes at the shyness of it and smiled back. To the ladies and other assembled dwarves I said, “Guess. Please.”
I heard shouted answers of everything from forty-eight to thirty. I laughed. “Bombur, Thorin won the age-guessing contest; what did he guess? You never told me.”
Bombur patted his beard with the back of his hand to sop up some of the wine that had spilled. “I believe his guess was twenty-nine.”
I nodded. To the others I grandly announced, making a decision that, as much as I disliked it, would save me heaps of trouble down the road, “I am twenty-eight!” Dwarf ages tended to be about twice those I was accustomed to for humans, I’d decided.
“So young!” one woman exclaimed.
“Have you anyone to stay with yet?” asked another, a concerned look etched into her face.
“Well well, we have quite a crowd!” I heard Gandalf proclaim, and twisted to see the top half of him wending its way through the outskirts. “Mabyn, are you in there? I suspect you are.”
Fluidly I stood on the bench and waved. “And aren’t you just always right.”
“Mabyn,” he said seriously. “You forgot someone while you were making your rounds this morning, and he’s quite put out.” He looked down at his side.
I beamed. “Bilbo?” I jumped off the bench and the assembled dwarves made room for me as I wove through them. “Bilbo?” At last I saw him, gave a cry of joy and flung my arms around him.
“I’ve been looking for you since I heard you were awake!” he admonished through his happiness.
“I’m sure you have and I’m very sorry!” I insisted. “I didn’t see you anywhere and I was so full of energy I just hopped off the balcony without thinking.”
“Well that does sound like a hazard,” he said, and we chuckled.
Letting him go I eased back. “I’m very happy to see you and very sorry to have missed you earlier,” I said. A sad through seeped into me and my smile faded. “You’re not staying, are you? You’ve got another home to go back to.”
He gave me a sad smile of his own. “I’m afraid I do rather miss it. Gandalf and I will be off when things settle down a bit, I expect.”
“I will miss you. I wish we could have gotten to know each other a bit longer.”
“It’s not as if you’re not welcome for a visit!” he insisted. “You’re welcome any time, any time you like. If I’m there tea is always at four.”
I grinned. “I’ll remember that.” Something itched in the top of my tunic and I pulled it out; I didn’t even remember stowing a bit of bread in there. I wonder what the ladies had thought. I nibbled at it thoughtfully.
Bilbo gave me a look. “I see you’re back to your old habits.”
“I’ll take that as a good sign. Hey, where are the others? I haven’t seen them in hours.”
Gandalf smiled down at me even as Bilbo couldn’t hide a smile of his own. “I believe,” said Gandalf, “that you may wish to limit how much you eat this afternoon. Bofur asked Dain for permission to pretend they were having a feast tonight. He argues that it isn’t for you, there’s been precious little celebrating going on despite the great victory you all have won.”
Gandalf’s prediction turned out to be correct. Some two hours later—most of which I spent getting to know the sprightly dwarven ladies—Bifur, Dori, Dwalin and Nori came into the great dining room preceded by a mob of cheering dwarves. Dori and Dwalin carried between them, strung on a stout pole, a boar they had managed to track down in the surrounding wilds and kill. The ladies immediately escorted them into the kitchen and diverted all other foods to smaller fires so they could roast it over the longest and hottest one. The outer layers would be ready by suppertime, and the inner layers would cook as the outer were carved away.
The ladies who were working the kitchens also began throwing together a variety of stews, breads and other hearty fares for the feast with a limited food supply that we were apparently going to have that night.
“Was all of this shipped in from elsewhere?” I marveled as Dila and a few other ladies I’d met that day showed me through the kitchens, warning me not to touch things and pointing out where the ‘bellows-boards’ were, boards or movable stone slabs built into the floor so the cooks could stand and breathe the fires while doing other work.
“Most of it, yes,” said Dila, sampling a wide pot of stew when the attending cook’s back was turned. “The lads have done rounds out hunting too for the meat, and some of it has been sealed in glass for ages. The way we preserved it it’s probably safe to eat, but it doesn’t look terribly appetizing anymore and no one wants to be the poor brave sot who tries it and turns up wrong.”
It had been dark for about three or four hours when the rest of the Company showed up for good—they’d been coming and going as individuals or in pairs—and surrounded me. They told me about their days and how glad they were again that I could join them and then hustled me off to a place they’d picked out for me midway down one of the many long tables.
The feast had no discernible start to me, since there’d already been food rotating out over the tables, but eventually platters of thickly steaming meat began passing down, stuck through with heavy iron forks I was not trusted to wield to serve myself—Oin who sat next to me handled my meat servings for me. There were jars of entire preserved cherries being passed down too, from some other town I expected, and jars of sliced peaches. I threw everything together on top of each other on my plate, and when the others stared at me I only spread my hands and said, “What? It’s all going to the same place, isn’t it?”
“Mabyn, try this!” Bifur suggested from across the table and down a ways. He had a dark roll in one raised hand.
I flapped my own hand at him. “No no, thank you. This will fill me right to the gills and still probably spill over some.” I gesticulated over my plate.
“Then why’d you take so much?” Nori wanted to know.
“Because I’ve been half-starving for weeks of having no appetite and precious little sense of taste and I’m now making up for it!”
“Just a bite!” Bifur insisted, and chucked the roll at me.
My catching skills leave something to desired so when I wildly batted it away from its trajectory with my face it landed in Bilbo’s bowl and splashed soup all over the front of his jacket. I apologized profusely, hurled a chicken bone in Bifur’s general direction, and hastily leaned across the table with my napkin to try to blot at Bilbo’s coat even though I really couldn’t reach.
Bofur pointed at me with false sternness. “Hey now, lass, the only reason we aren’t waging an all out food war to defend our honor is because there’s a food shortage.” Clearly he was on his brother’s side.
“Oh tosh!” I shot back, half shouting over the din of so many voices that was building around us. Full mouths certainly didn’t slow the dwarves down. “The only reason you’re surrendering is because you’re afraid of my outright and hidden skills, admit it!”
“I’ll admit nothing!”
“What skills?” Bifur wanted to know. “Just because you can climb a wall with no handholds that’s supposed to be impregnable doesn’t mean you can do everything a hands-clever person ought to be able to do!”
I had already opened my mouth wide to snap back a smart retort when a deep voice from behind me made me shrink in size by at least a few centimeters.
“I think unfortunately we’re going to have to sand that wall just so others don’t try to replicate Mistress Mabyn’s feats.”
I cringed, looking over my shoulder, still standing from wiping at Bilbo’s splotched coat. A tall, broad dwarf with an orange mass of hair and beard stood behind me, and something in his bearing told me he had more standing than any of the rest of us, and I instinctively brought my shoulders in. Lifelong habit. Men of power frighten me. Just because I’d grown accustomed to one and liked another didn’t mean I would be able to love or even like all of them. There was something glinting in his eyes I couldn’t identify—it could be either mirth or mischief and I wouldn’t know the difference.
The orange-bearded dwarf with deep-set, brown eyes—at least I wasn’t the only one—offered a wide hand. “Mistress Mabyn, my name is Dain,” he proclaimed. “I’ve come from the Iron Hills.”
(pg30)
Last Edit: 26 December 2014